Lean Enterprise Approach in Health Care Organizations.

A number of health care organizations have looked to manufacturing firms to develop process improvement initiatives that address their challenges. While they use slightly different terminology of lean, they have adopted many of the lean principles and practices to improve patient care. The industry began asking the same question as Automobile and Aerospace did years before: Can lean thinking be applied to health care? The following examples show attempts to do just that.

• Kaiser Permanente-Northern California has revamped its large primary care department using lean methods to reduce the appointment backlog (55 day wait times for an appointment) to deliver an open-access system. They collaborated with a university operations research group to develop an excel-based just-in-time scheduling system to support this new process.


• Two cancer institutes, Cancer Treatment Centers of America and Clearview Cancer Institute (CCI), employed a value stream approach to improve their operation process. Cancer Treatment Centers of America used the value stream mapping techniques to redesign their prescription process to cut a 32 step process in half and reduce turnaround times by 20%.


• In primary care practice, a medical clinic in Dubuque, Iowa developed improved office practices. They improve their process by observing and eliminating waste and applying standardization of tests and processes, and empowerment of nurses to identify and implement changes.
  
  This is of course not an exhaustive list. List your examples…