Six Sigma a business improvement program incubated at Motorola in the 80s.  Since then it has transformed into a wider initiatives and many large Fortune 500 corporations have used it and claim to have had succeeded with it.

Then the question is:  Can Lean Six Sigma Deliver the Needed breakthrough performance in Healthcare Sector?

That is a big task…  a very big one.  To answer that question one also has to understand how much six sigma has helped (or not) the big companies.  Historically, there were significant improvements in Motorola but then Motorola again went into ruts in the 90s.  GE used it aggressively under the leadership of Jack Welch.  While the claim in GE were very high, but Jack understood that the measures being reported were not the most reliable ones.  However, it did help GE transform its culture.  Six Sigma is not in the fabric of GE.

Then on the other hands lots of companies including motorola failed miserably with their six sigma initiatives.

A deeper analysis of these successes and failures would lead one to conclude that in fact Six Sigma is just an instrument.  There is and was something more to get the benefit out of it.  GE had the ability to adapt it to its needs and make good use of it.  Secondly, made sure that top performers are using the tool to create better results. 

So what was the difference between Motorola and GE?  It is leadership.  It does matter.

Then came along the wave of cottage industries.   These days in fact you can get a Six Sigma certification dime a dozen.  Tons of universities, private institutions, and consultants jumped into it.   While spreading the knowledge was and is good.  What happened during this transformative phase though, is that Six Sigma got transformed into a diluted program.  Many of the people who went on to become BB, MBB, Deployment Champions got involved in it not because they had true understanding and leadership into it, but because they were able to dilute the vision to more palatable version and sold it to be a better option.

Proof is in the results.  There are more industries now than before who had to reinvigorate or turn around or do a course correction to their Six Sigma Programs.

Then to answer the question whether Six Sigma can create needed healthcare improvements or not; we would say that it definitely can create improvements. 

But not the breakthrough.  For a breakthrough performance improvement, several things need to happen.

• Leadership has to accept that it does need help.  It is difficult to separate true desires versus the lipservices.  Note that inspite of all the quality and process improvements, research shows that the reduction in avoidable injuries and deaths in the hospitals have been close to nil.
• The processes in the healthcare sector are mostly legacy.  Using lean six sigam may improve them, but they are not capable ot delivering the break through results.  It is like you take your care of 60s and expect it to give performance of 90s.  No matter how much you rebuild, it is still going to be not upto the mark.  That is the reasons, they make new cars using new technologies.
• For groundbreaking performance, then healthcare NEEDS DFSS.  Design for Six Sigma.  A real program that can help redesign the processes and systems. 
• The sector has to be careful of DFSS experts who have read books or have experience…  but they do not have the competencies.  It is very difficult to screen the real ones from the posers.
• Leadership has to open to people from non-health sectors.  Here is a very good example of challenge.  One of the providers was looking for informatics head.  They insisted for a person not only to have inormatics background but he/she must have license to practice.  The core competency of a physician is to administer medicine and a core competency of a informatics person is to design a good clinical system.  Irony is that they filtered out some top notch talents because of their insistence.
• With HIT coming so fast, any breakthrough performance can be achieved and sustained only if the improvements, implementations, and HIT are synnergised. 
• Many of the EMRs for example have failed because of the lack of proper pre-implementation due diligence, lack of sufficient program management competencies, and even more importantly due to the lack of good quality product.
• The product quality is not in the hands of hospitals, but they can certainly look into their strategies and chose a product that can be configured to deliver the result desired.
• Stop thinking that HIT is going to give performance improvement in cost, quality, and speed.  HIT is just a platform.  Do not waste your time implementing these if you are not willing to fix the process and infrastructure issues.

There are a lot more need to be look into.  Bottom line is that a hospital executive should build a good team, redesign processes using DFSS, select product that fit the vision of growth, and then implement.

You will get the break through performance if you are open for a transformative change.