tl;dr: A closer look at NHS patient dignity data shows that small year-to-year changes don’t automatically mean improvement. By plotting the data over time and using Process Behavior Charts, we can see when a real system change occurred–and avoid misleading…
I had a chance to visit one of their community hospitals, Hillcrest Hospital, as well as the main campus. It was a very stimulating visit and it was great to see the progress they were making in building a “culture of improvement.”
This article caught my eye recently:
Skeptics - We have Proof that Operational Excellence Work in Healthcare!
(via The Ohio State University)
Mark’s Note: Here is another guest post from Drew Locher. I’m hoping that he’ll contribute occasionally to the blog as a guest author. My podcast with him is coming soon… please do read his “part 1” of this post and then…
Dr. Gary Kaplan is the CEO of Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center, considered one of the world leaders in the adoption of Lean healthcare principles. He wrote the foreword for my book The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen. He co-authored a recent…
In yesterday’s blog post (“Safety is always our top priority” – From lip service to daily practice?“), I challenged hospital leaders to back up the “happy talk” with real action and stories about putting safety first. It’s easier said than…
It’s a pretty common facilitation technique to do a “plus / delta” discussion at the end of a meeting, exercise, etc. In the plus column go the things that went well, were enjoyable, were helpful, and should repeated. The “deltas”…
The list of stuff I’ve read and wanted to blog about has grown… that inventory becomes a post like this. Here are links to some varied articles I’ve read recently that might be of interest on a number of Lean…
Some of the best lessons I have ever learned for my career are from Donald Wheeler’s brilliant book Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos. One idea is that data without context is meaningless. The other is the application of…
Are We 84.7% Certain We’re in the 90th Percentile? Of course, hospitals should focus on patient satisfaction. That’s important but is often a vague and uncertain thing to measure. But, as Dr. Deming said: “The most important figures that one…
