Tag: Patient Safety

Three or four months ago, in the midst of a discussion on LinkedIn about patient safety, somebody made reference to a 1966 cover story...

If this post is a bit of a rant, I apologize. The problems here are avoidable and fixable. That's one reason I get so...

"Through a collaboration with Toyota, Children's HealthSM, the leading pediatric health system in North Texas, announced today it has successfully reduced rates of central line-associated blood stream infections (CLABSIs) by 75 percent with patients in the gastroenterology unit."

I'm excited to be playing host for a KaiNexus webinar on August 30 on a topic that's very important to me (and to many) -- patient safety. As I mentioned yesterday on LinkedIn, estimates suggest that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States, with approximately 250,000 deaths a year... and that's four times as many deaths as caused by the opioid crisis. Don't get me wrong, opioid abuse and what happens to patients who end up addicted is horrible. But the newly-named "national emergency" of opioid abuse gets far more attention than what I would call "the international patient safety emergency" that has been around for a long time. I try bringing attention to the serious, yet solvable, problem of patient harm caused by preventable medical error. That's why I'm happy that we'll have three presenters on the 30th on this topic: "Teaming with Patients to Improve Safety" Click here to register - the webinar is free.

A few of you sent me this sad article from the Wall St. Journal:  "'People Are Dying Here': Federal Hospitals Fail Tribes."  I feel like I've some variation of this article and exposé many times over. Sometimes, it's some form of government medicine (active duty military medicine, the VA, or another country) or it's a similar sad story from the private healthcare sector (be it non-profit or for-profit).

Last month, I saw this article from the publication Hospitals & Health Networks (H&HN), where they summarized a speech given by the legendary Dr....

A reader asks why I got involved with Lean in healthcare. In this post, I share what I wrote about this in the preface to "Lean Hospitals" and I share some additional thoughts and reflections.

The mistakes at The Oscars were trivial and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. What are some lessons learned that apply to improving healthcare supply chains?

One of the highlights of my podcasting adventures was the opportunity to interview Paul H. O'Neill back in 2011. The original episode was posted here as #124 in the series. This post a summary of our discussion.

In today's post, I write about James Hereford, a Lean thinker and leader who is now CEO of Fairview Health Services in Minnesota. I share some links to and highlights from a past podcast with him and other blog posts with his thoughts.

Can leaders get some improvement just by asking for it? Does improvement stall out if we don't have a method for doing so? What can "process behavior" charts show us in our work today?

StoreSMART, a Rochester, New York-based manufacturer and retailer, has been an advertiser on this blog for over six months now. I also very much appreciate that they are trying to learn how to better serve those who are practicing Lean...