Tag: Kaizen

Today, we're looking back at a podcast that I did back in 2015 with Alan G. Robinson, PhD, co-author of many books including The Idea-Driven Organization....

Back in 2012, I blogged twice about aspects of Dr. Donald M. Berwick's 1989 article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Continuous Improvement as an Ideal in Health Care.” The full text is only available to subscribers. As I posted on LinkedIn, another aspect of this article caught my eye when I was reviewing it the other day in advance of my talk at the Studer Group "What's Right in Healthcare" conference next week. 

One thing I like about Facebook is the way it reminds you about things that happened on this date in previous years. Facebook is...

Every month or two, Greg Jacobson, MD and I have an "Ask Us Anything" video discussion with questions submitted by members of our KaiNexus...

I've produced A LOT of content about Kaizen and continuous improvement over the past 11 years, including podcasts and webinars. Somebody asked me to build a "curriculum" and a sequence of podcasts and webinars for people to watch as a way of getting educated about this approach. So this post is an attempt at that...

It's been just over six years since I joined the team at KaiNexus, serving in various capacities over that time. As I like to say, even though I don't work full time with the company, I have a full commitment to the company, the team, and their approach. The company has grown by leaps and bounds, adding customers not just in healthcare, but in other industries. You can read more about our aggregate customer results here. Recently, our customers just crossed the threshold of a combined one million hours of labor time saved, in addition to over $250 million in financial impact... in addition to quality, safety, customer and employee satisfaction improvements. Back in 2011, I interviewed the CEO and co-founder of KaiNexus, Dr. Greg Jacobson:

Kaizen is an incremental approach to problem solving and continuous improvement. We don't need to put pressure on ourselves to make things perfect... we can focus on "a little better, every day."

In this post, I write about a phrase that I heard many times when visiting Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis. How can this phrase help us challenge ourselves and to find positive solutions instead of barriers and obstacles?

At the recent Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, there were thought provoking presentations... and we had many discussions about the role of incremental improvement vs. redesign or transformation. And, lots of discussions about imitating vs. innovating... so I explore those themes in this post.

In this post, I share some thoughts and build upon one of the presentations at last week's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit, where, Tim Pehrson, a regional CEO for Intermountain Healthcare, talked about how they piloted a continuous improvement process in one region... and how they're now spreading it throughout the system. This leads to confusion, in online discussion, about terms like projects, suggestions, ideas, and such...

There are many helpful videos on YouTube with great illustrations of Kaizen and continuous improvement mindsets and principles. In this post, I'm going to share three...

If we're going to practice Kaizen (continuous improvement), do the words matter? Should we call it a Kaizen Card or something else? Do we start with a "problem" or something else? Are we writing down "ideas" or "countermeasures?" Does it matter?