Leveraging Lean in Medical Laboratories [ Active ]

Preface: Leveraging Lean in the Laboratory

This book is intended as guide for healthcare executives and leaders, managers, process improvement team members, and inquisitive frontline workers who want to implement and leverage Lean in the Laboratory. Its foundation is based upon the Shingo prize winning book, Leveraging Lean in Healthcare: Transforming. Your Enterprise into a High Quality Patient-Care Delivery System.¹ The core chapters provide detailed information on the concepts, principles, and implementation of Lean in the healthcare environment. We felt it was critical to provide the reader with a broad foundation on the application of Lean in healthcare so one can see the how Lean can be applied throughout the continuum of care from the emergency room to other ancillary hospital services. Lean concepts and tools can begin in any clinical or non-clinical support area within an integrated delivery system and applied universally. High-Quality Patient Care is imperative in healthcare. We strive for the highest quality care systems, in the pursuit of the triple aim:

High-Quality Patient Care is imperative in healthcare. We strive for the highest quality care systems, in the pursuit of the triple aim:

1. improving health of the population,

2. enhancing the experience of care (quality and satisfaction i.e., value), and

3. reducing the per capita cost.

Organizations must ¡nd effective ways to maximize value. The Lean Business Delivery System is one way to accomplish this.

Lean is a different way to think. It begins with understanding the voice of the customer and focusing on delivering value. Lean provides the foundational concepts and tools to identify and eliminate waste. We do not encourage working faster or harder, as "haste makes wastes". We just encourage working more ef¡ciently.

Business means that Lean applies to anything that is a process, whether it is part of the physical patient care, information systems, or business systems (i.e., accounting, billing, marketing, etc.). All business processes should ³ow in order to reduce cycle times and waste throughout the entire system.

Delivery refers to what it takes to deliver your product or service to the customer. The focus is on what value is added to the customer.

System, a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a uni¡ed whole², implies that there are components required that need to work together to form an integrated delivery network or system. Effective high value healthcare delivery relies on a supporting infrastructure in order to evaluate, and provide care. Understanding and looking at the overall Healthcare Delivery System means every process we try to improve is linked or integrated with other processes.

The healthcare delivery system often begins with a patient presenting in an of¡ce, urgent care, or emergency room, for an evaluation. The Laboratory plays a critical role in the patient evaluation as the timeliness and accuracy of clinical laboratory test results can mean the difference between life and death. The effective collection, processing and resulting of laboratory tests can impact capacity and throughput as inef¡ciencies in the system can causes delays from the emergency department to the inpatient units.

When you put all these words together, Lean Business Delivery System, it leads to a culture change that is powerful for any organization. The culture change is such that if you really apply Lean concepts and tools, you can become a world-class leader. If you have started, or are considering a Baldrige, or Shingo Prize journey, deploying Lean will positively impact virtually all the criteria. As Baldrige, Shingo and Lean are about never-ending, continuous iterations of improvement.

¹ Leveraging Lean in Healthcare: Transforming Your Enterprise into a High Quality Patient-Care Delivery System, Proztman, Mayzell, Kerpchar.

² http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/system