Tag: Healthcare

I wrote a new piece for LinkedIn that I hope would be of interest to you even if you’re in healthcare. Why? It’s a story about what an organization does when you don’t have enough (or any) direct work for your front-line staff to do. Toyota would continue paying employees and would put them to...

If you follow the auto industry, you might have seen headlines this week about how Toyota is being forced to shut down production in...

I get asked a lot, “How do you know if a hospital is truly ‘Lean?'” Nobody is ever perfect or “fully Lean,” but you could ask, “How do you know if somebody is on a legitimate Lean transformation journey?” If you could only ask one question...

Alternate title: “Lean is an Integrated System. Of Course Just Implementing Pieces Leads to Failure.” Throughout the 10 years that I’ve been involved with Lean healthcare efforts, I’ve heard multiple stories of organizations that ended their formal Lean initiatives. They do so, as I’ve been told, because they need to cut costs...

Mark's Note: Today's post is an excerpt, used with permission, from a new book by Steven Leuschel titled "Lean Culture Change," with an introduction...

My guest for episode #240 is somebody I've wanted to interview for a long time, Leah Binder, the president and CEO of Leapfrog Group,...

Later today and tomorrow, I'll be attending the annual World Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit that's produced by a non-profit called the Patient...

In the midst of the discussion about the NEJM article, John Shook of LEI (a former Toyota employee) pointed me to this 1993 HBR article: "Time-and-Motion Regained" I believe it's freely available...

Yesterday, I wrote Part 1 of this post on the Cleveland Clinic Improvement Model. Part 1 covered the left hand half of the model, with...

Back in November, I had a chance to meet Nate Hurle, from Cleveland Clinic, as he was giving a presentation about their work with...

In the article posted today, Pamela Hartzband, M.D., and Jerome Groopman, M.D. (the later the author of the popular book How Doctors Think), rant about all sorts of things… some of which have nothing to do with Lean...

It's very frustrating when I hear people in healthcare complain that their hospital or health system has equated Lean with cost savings -- only focusing on cost reduction or primarily focusing on it...