I had the opportunity to participate in a lean six sigma conference for last two days.  Of course, healthcare track was of special interest to me.

Here are some of the take aways:

1)  There are hospital networks grown through merger.  There processes are as far apart as one can imagine.  These provide opportunity as well as challenges.  The opportunities are that the processes can be standardized.  This not only reduces the management cost but also improves quality and consistency.

2)Challenge is that many believe that because each facilities have different signature and hence can not be standardized.

  It is, however, important to streamline and standardize as much as possible.  In order to achieve the maximum amount of productivity, one may look into creating a process framework.  What that means is that start creating a higer level process.  In most of the cases, the processes at higher levels are same.  Most of the governance structure is at that level.  Let the individual facilities customize at the execution level if need be.

3) There are studies where the nurses have been clocked to spend lesss than 15% of the time near the bed.  A national study shows around 50% of the time goes towads non-clinical activity.  An improved utilization of nurses would reduce, if not eliminate the shortage of nurses.

4) Some hospitals have observed that many nursing departments themselves are responsbile for degradation of their functional use.  They should assert themselves more into their roles and responsbilities of a nurse.

5) There was a nice comment that ” we do not have shortage of nurses, we have shortage of nurses wanting to be a nurse”.  This to some is happening as they are not finding their training aligned with real life work.  Some just do not like the non-clinical work.

6) There are lots of activities that should not be there at all.  These protocalls were established and retracted.  But due to missed communication, they still remain in effect.

7) The healthcare system is in a shape that we should be focussing less on improvement and more on redesign.  It should be redesigned to meet the socio-eco-economic needs.  I have made this point several times here on THT that the processes have become so complicated that an improvment upon them is not at good investment as just redesigning them

The key to redesign is to make sure it is not addressing today’s needs.  But it is addressing the need of tomorrow.

9) There is a lot of waste in the non-clincal areas..such as inventory. 

10) many believe that if done properly, there is about 30% productivity gain possibility.

Overall, there was a good ideas coming from healthcare professional on how to improve performance.  Safety and patient-centricity was considered core to future.  They were a bit worried about the resistance from the use of word lean.  Many have changed their burden to reduction of overburden program.