Last year, the Institute of Medicine released its latest report titled, “Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America.” The report endorsed Lean as one strategy for improving the problems in our health care…
Here is a commentary that was written by Gary S. Kaplan, MD, the CEO of Virginia Mason Medical Center: “The Lean Approach to Health Care: Safety, Quality, and Cost.” More than a decade ago, Kaplan and the team at VMMC…
Listen A returning guest for episode #159 is John Toussaint, MD, the CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value and the author of the books On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry and Potent…
Thanks to Healthcare Finance News for interviewing me for this piece they ran this week: “7 ways lean healthcare management reduces cost.” As I think the piece conveys, cost reduction comes as a result mainly from methods that are different…
I went through our new book Healthcare Kaizen to categorize the different improvement examples in the book… We have, by my count, 124 examples from hospitals and healthcare organizations around the world., not including the fun examples from Chapter 12…
Virginia Mason Medical Center, a world-renowned leader in the application of Lean principles in healthcare, has a new blog: Virginia Mason Blog. They name blogs the way I do, simple and direct :-) One of their first posts highlights a…
Just heard on CNN, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts: “… Congress had a balanced intent. You can’t look at another provision and say this promotes patient protection without asking if it’s affordable.” Unfortunately, it seems the Chief Justice…
American hospitals are concerned (understatement!) about their future revenues as healthcare reform gets implemented. I heard one senior executive tell his staff, “We are never going to be paid more for the work that we do than we are today.”…
I was at the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value office a few months ago when Dr. John Toussaint reported that he had gotten a call from Dr. Don Berwick, the head of Medicare and Medicaid. Dr. Berwick wanted a collection…
Hat tip to my friend and fellow Productivity Press author Naida Grunden for pointing out an article she is a co-author on, “Improving Patient Care in Cardiac Surgery Using Toyota Production System Based Methodology,” published in the journal of The…
