Healthcare industry is at the beginning stages of Six Sigma deployment.  The rising cost of care, the high level of quality issues, and shortage of access is demanding fundamental change in the healthcare industry.  While the Six Sigma initiative could have been adapted by healthcare earlier, the delay has inherent advantage of learning from the mistakes of others.  Over the years, there has been several variations of Six Sigma have evolved.  Each of them have their own place in the solution development process. 

The key goal of a business leader is to serve a market with right products and services.  Products and Service should be of high quality, available on demand, and must be affordable.  Prof. C.K. Prahlad of Michigan University also says that these product and services need to be customizable to the individual needs in his N=1 model.  Surveying the market can help one identify the goal.

Once the goal has been identifies, then the natural question arises ‘what next?’ arises.  How does a project lead chooses the solution roadmap from the Lean Six Sigma box?  We generally have three roadmaps:  Lean, Six Sigma, and Design for Six Sigma (DFSS).  The first two methods are primarily for improvement types of activities and the last one is for development of new product or for the modification of the existing one.  In  the last few years. many have combined the Improvement methods into one and have named it Lean Six Sigma.  We were the first to recognise the need and created a speedy problem solving roadmap called RapidSigma.

So how does one choose a roadmap!  As the goals are defined, the immediate question that need to be asked is if there is already any product of service that can meet the market need.  One scenarios of possibility is that there is no product or service available. In such cases where business has no product or service available, it needs to develop a new one.  In terms of Six Sigma methodology, the process that lends to robust product (new or redesign) in shortest time is called Design for Six Sigma (DFSS).  It is important to point out here that with DFSS, business also must utilize a complementary business process.  The business process generally used for product (re)design is generally referred as New Product Development (NPD) Process or New Product Introduction (NPI) Process.  The NPD/NPI serves the need for management oversight.  Its gates are mostly to discuss the validity of the goal, adherence to cost, quality goals, project status, and risks.  Design for Six Sigma is mostly technical process, which runs in parallel to the NPI process.

Design for Six Sigma is also utilized for the case where there is a product or service which does not meet the current market needs and it has been concluded that any amount of effort would lend it to become capable to meeting the market need.  Such scenario calls for development of new product or service, or significant amount of product modification and upgrade.  

Another set of scenario arise when the process or product is available but currently does not meed the need of the market.  It is also believed that the product or service is capable of meeting the performance expectations.  However, currently it is not performing to its potential.  In these sets of possibilities, it will be prudent to use improvement roadmap.  Lead is expected to use lean methods for low hanging fruits and DMAIC (Six Sigma) for fine tuning the performance.  The combined method of Lean Six Sigma lays out the roadmap where the necessary tools from both the processes, lean and six sigma, are used on the need basis.

It is important to choose the right method in the pursuit of providing solution to healthcare business needs to make better use of resources.

Examples:

1)Use of DFSS when there is no existing product/process: New Process, New System, New Report, etc.

2) Use of DFSS when there is a product or process but is incapable of meeting the demand: Modification of forms for ERP deployments, Modification of Order entry Process, etc

3) Use of Lean when there is a product and process performing below the capability: Eliminating prescription Errors due to Handwriting, Missing Patients, Performing Surgery on the Wrong Foot.

4) Use of Six Sigma (DMAIC) when thereis a product or process performing below the capability: Order entry process so that medicines are adminisered right on time.

I would like to invite reader to share their experience and example on this topic to enrich the experience of fellow readers.