When applied rigorously and throughout an entire healthcare organization, Lean Six Sigma principles can have a positive impact on patient, relative and staff experience of care, and on outcomes. While sceptics are right when they say, “Patients are not cars,” healthcare is, in fact, delivered in extraordinarily complex organizations, with thousands of interacting processes. Many aspects of Lean and Six Sigma methodologies therefore can and do apply to the processes of delivering care.
Lean principles use the same scientific method to diagnose and treat organizational problems as doctors use to diagnose and treat medical conditions.
Includes time spent inspecting or fixing errors. Example: an item missing from a surgical case cart. Administration of incorrect medications. Hospital-acquired conditions.
Includes doing more than what is needed by the patient or doing it sooner than needed. A broad example of this is the performance of unnecessary diagnostic procedures.
Unnecessarily moving patients, specimens, or materials throughout a system is wasteful. This type of waste is evident when the hospital has a poor layout, such as a cath lab located a long distance from the emergency department.
Patients in waiting rooms (or exam rooms). Staff members with uneven workloads waiting for their next task. Emergency department patients and physicians waiting for test results. Emergency department patients waiting to be admitted to the hospital. Patients waiting to be discharged once medically ready.
Waste created by excess inventory, storage, and movement costs. One example is letting supplies expire and then disposing of them, including out-of-date medications.
Do employees move from room to room, floor to floor and building to building more than necessary? That accounts for one type of waste. Example: lab employees may walk miles per day due to a poor hospital layout.
Describes work performed that is not valued by the patient or aligned with patient needs. Unnecessary paperwork. Consultation by specialists that are not medically necessary.
This waste is caused when employees are not engaged, heard, or supported. Employees may feel burnt out and cease sharing ideas for improvement.
iAudited’s audit solution for healthcare is a quick and effective tool to sustain waste minimization and maximize the usage of surgical infrastructure.
A process audit is a comparative evaluation of an organization’s actual process vs. ideal state process.
Layered Process Audits (LPA) are performed periodically and by all layers of the organization (example of layers: supervisors, engineers, managers etc.) LPAs are common in the automotive manufacturing industry. However, any organization can utilize LPAs to sustain best-practices in their process.