Lean healthcare is a quality improvement philosophy that originated from Toyota's lean manufacturing principles. It aims to maximize value for patients through continuous improvement efforts. The key lean principles for healthcare include an attitude of continuous improvement using the PDSA cycle, creating value by improving outcomes while reducing costs and non-monetary burdens for all stakeholders, having a unity of purpose through clear organizational priorities, respecting frontline workers by empowering them to solve problems, using visual tools to track metrics, and establishing flexible standardized processes. Implementing lean requires transforming the organizational culture to prioritize frontline innovation and ongoing improvement.

1. Lean Healthcare

2. Lean Management
• Definition of Lean
– a quality improvement philosophy and set of principles
originated by the Toyota Motor Company.
– Lean In Healthcare
• An organization’ s cultural commitment to applying the
scientific method to designing, performing, and continuously
improving the work delivered by teams of people, leading to
measurably better value for patients and other stakeholders.
• Transforms how an organization works and
creates an insatiable quest for improvement.

3. Lean Healthcare Principles
– Attitude of continuous improvement
– value creation
– unity of purpose
– respect for front-line workers
– visual tracking
– flexible regimentation

4. Attitude of Continuous Improvement
•
The Deming Cycle
– Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA)
– central tenet of Lean.
• Transform Culture
– senior management must relinquish the role of master problem solver
to those who are closer to the problems to be solved
•
Lean uses basic approach of measuring whether new process is
superior to existing process.
• Uses rapid improvement event leads to changes
– a staff huddles every morning to monitor and discuss the metrics
•
•
•
•
wait time
Call volume
Dropped call rate
among other topics.

5. Value Creation
• Improve value for patients
–
–
–
–
–
–
Fewer medication errors
fewer nosocomial infections
less nursing time away from the bedside
faster operating room turnover time
improved care team communication about patients
faster response time for emergent cases
• Benefits
–
–
–
–
–
–
patients
Physicians
Nurses
healthcare organizations
Payers
Community

6. Cont. Value Creation
• Value in health care has been conceptualized
as health outcomes per dollar spent
• value more broadly as benefits received for
burdens endured
– Monetary costs
– Nonmonetary costs.

7. Cont. Value Creation
• Benefits vs Burdens
– Conceptualization of value
• medical outcomes
• financial costs
• Extends
– patients’ perceptions of the overall healthcare experience
• Measuring improvement in processes
– Questions that robust Lean measurement should answer
• Who is affected by the changed processes and in what ways?
• Do benefits increase?
• Do burdens decrease?

8. Cont. Value Creation
• Value stream maps are a principal Lean tool
used to distinguish between discrete steps in a
process that do or do not contribute value

9. Unity of Purpose
• clarifies priorities and guides staff in improvement
work accordingly.
• Focused Work
• Priorities govern investment of improvement
resources.
• Prioritize and clearly communicate a small number of
strategic goal categories relevant throughout the
organization
• Have the most promise to strengthen the organization
• Create stakeholder value.

10. Cont. Unity of Purpose
• Projects fit within this strategic framework
• Specific improvement projects (the “ how” )
• Move the organization forward in its
prioritized goal categories (the “ what” )
• Management uses a process called catchball
– Communication back and forth in the
organization builds consensus, understanding, and
engagement around the priorities

11. Respect for Front-line Workers
• leadership upside down, with front-line
workers doing much of the innovating and
managers trusting them to do it and
supporting them
• front-line workers to have the brainpower
and commitment to improve the work must
pervade the organization
• Respect flows downward, not just upward.

12. Cont. Respect for Front-line Workers
• Management must make special efforts to
create a safe environment for innovation
• Attacking processes rather than people so that
staff members do not fear reporting problems

13. VisualTracking
• information displays mounted on the walls in
staff-only areas
• information is dynamic and directly relates to
what staff are thinking about in terms of how
best to provide what patients need and want
• The value stream maps helped prioritize
design requirements that contributed to the
facility being built

14. Flexible Regimentation
• Processes are perfectly designed to produce the
results that occur
• key to improvement is determining the root
cause (or causes) of performance shortfalls and
ridding the process of the cause(s) through
redesign.
• Take nonstandard work processes and transform
them into standard processes that improve
performance and then continue to improve the
standard work design through PDSA

15. Final Note
• Lean is an innovative management approach that has proven
successful in health care organizations.
• It offers promise for improving quality and efficiency while
controlling costs in the provision of optimum patient care.
• To implement the Lean philosophy and principles, however, is to
undertake an arduous, never-ending improvement journey.
• Because Lean transforms organizational culture from the inside
out, it offers both challenges and opportunities.
• It requires a major shift in roles:
– managers and leaders must become facilitators
– mentors, and teachers and allow front-line workers to make
improvements.
– It engages the entire staff in identifying and solving problems based on
a continuous improvement attitude, the driving force behind Lean
work.

16. References
Bell, S. C., & Orzen, M. A. (2011). Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation.
Director (p. 349). CRC Press.
Clark, D. M., Silvester, K., & Knowles, S. (2013). Lean management systems: creating a
culture of continuous quality improvement. Journal of clinical pathology, 66(8), 638–43.
doi:10.1136/jclinpath-2013-201553
Toussaint, J. S., & Berry, L. L. (2013). The promise of Lean in health care. Mayo Clinic
proceedings. Mayo Clinic, 88(1), 74–82. doi:10.1016/j.mayocp.2012.07.025
Womack, J. P., & Jones, D. T. (2005). Lean consumption. Harvard business review, 83(3), 58–
68, 148. doi:10.1049/me:20050411
Womack, J. P., Jones, D. T., & Roos, D. (1990). The Machine that Changed the World: The
Story of Lean Production. World (pp. 1–11). Harper Collins.
Yazdani, B. (1995). Toyota production system: An integrated approach to Just-In-Time.
Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems. doi:10.1016/0951-5240(95)90010-1