Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
January 19, 2010

Hospital Providing Better Health Care While Reducing Costs

Business Week has a good article on the strides one hospital has been able to make at reducing costs and improving quality. Hospitals: Radical Cost Surgery

Walk into Providence Regional Medical Center, in Everett, Wash., and you will see a hospital trying something different: It brings the equipment to the patient. In 2003, Providence opened one of the few “single stay” wards in the nation. After heart surgery, cardiac patients remain in one room throughout their recovery; only the gear and staff are in motion. As the patient’s condition stabilizes, the beeping machines of intensive care are removed and physical therapy equipment is added. Testing gear is wheeled to the patient, not the other way around. Patient satisfaction with the “single stay” ward has soared, and the average length of a hospital stay has dropped by a day or more.

High quality at a low price. Every other industry strives for that combination, but a hospital that does both is all too rare. Providence and its cost-efficient brethren demonstrate that quality care can be delivered at an affordable price, provided hospitals can be persuaded to rethink decades-old practices.

The crazy world of hospital economics does not offer a lot of incentives to change. Both Medicare and private insurers reimburse on a piecework basis – known as fee-for-service – that encourages hospitals to treat more, prescribe more, and test more.

Providence has also published data showing that infections, lengths of stay, and surgical complications have dropped since starting its own program.

But hospitalists are still controversial in many communities, because primary care physicians are wary of giving up control of their patients, along with their share of inpatient fees. Dr. Joanne C. Roberts, one of the first hospitalists at Providence, has not seen this conflict in Everett, possibly because most of the hospitalists and primary care doctors are associates at one large medical practice, Everett Clinic. That’s not true everywhere, she says. “In another community where I worked, independent doctors were pretty hostile. Everyone was trying to grab part of the money. That just doesn’t happen here.”

In a study of 2,531 operations at Providence, Brevig reported that the incidence of transfusions was reduced to just 18% in 2007, from 43% in 2003, while the average patient stay was reduced by half a day. The changes have saved Providence an estimated $4.5 million.

Brevig has been proselytizing for his plasma practices at medical meetings, but to little avail. Only some 200 U.S. hospitals have a blood conservation program. Since patients are billed the cost of the plasma, doctors aren’t motivated to change their habits.

There are many more great examples of positive actions being taken in health care. But all you have to do is look at the overwhelming evidence of how amazingly poorly the health care system in the United States is doing to know that it is, overall, an enormous failure. For decades the enormous cost of supporting special interest groups that benefit from the current broken system have forced the rest of society to pay for their unwillingness to improve. We can no longer afford to accept the poor performance. We need to adopt the new ideas much more quickly and eliminate the taxes on the rest of society to support those that want to take an every increasing amount from society to support their outdated, failed policies.

Related: Community Medical Care SuccessesCEOs Want Health-Care ReformUSA Spends Record $2.3 trillion ($7,681 Per Person) on Health Care in 2008Health Care: Lessons for the USA from Switzerland

December 20, 2009

Video Overview of the PDSA Cycle

Robert Lloyd, PhD From the IHI Open School‘s, presents a nice overview of the PDSA Cycle (plan-do-study-act). The webcast includes an example of using PDSA to improve the discharge process for a hospital.

As I have said many times the keys to success are to turn the PDSA cycle rapidly, predict the results in advance, and analyze the results to continually improve. the Improvement Handbook is an excellent resource.

The IHI Open School is a great resource and exactly the type of thing organizations with a mission to improve performance should be doing. Provide resources online that are easy for people to access and then apply in their organization. See more management webcasts.

Related: Tom Nolan on PDSASaving Lives: US Health Care Improvement5 Million Lives Campaign

October 22, 2009

Management Improvement Carnival #79

Mark Graban is hosting Management Improvement Carnival #79 on the lean blog, highlights include:

  • A Natural Match (Deborah Dolezal, Lean Healthcare Grand Rounds): “As a healthcare worker and an implementer of lean, I am often struck by the similarity of the human body and the lean methodologies.”
  • Kaizen Corner — for lack of a battery (Paul Levy, Running a Hospital): “The idea is to keep asking why (the 5 why’s) until they discover the root cause, which is defined as that level of understanding that will permit development of a countermeasure that will prevent the problem from occurring again.”
  • Put Down That Tool (Jamie Flinchbaugh): “Use the simplest tool possible. When you start to use tools that are more complicated than they need to be, we add unnecessary waste and bureaucracy to the process of improvement.”
  • How NUMMI Changed Its Culture (John Shook, Lean.org): “What I learned was most powerful at NUMMI was to start with the behaviors, with what we do.”

Related: Management Improvement Carnival #62Management Improvement Carnival #40Management Improvement Carnival #29

August 19, 2009

Blame the Road – Not the Person

The system is responsible for 90, 92, 94, 97% of problems – W. Edwards Deming. Fix the system, don’t blame the people. When you seek system fixes you approach situations differently than if you search for people to blame.

By the way, I am often asked about the data supporting Deming’s contention that the system was responsible for 97% of the problems. This statement was not based on a set of data but on Dr. Deming’s decades of experience. And he increased the percentage over time – as he learned more.

Roads that are designed to kill

Half blamed the runner, saying she should not have been running in the street at that hour. Half blamed the driver, for not paying close enough attention. Not a single writer blamed the road.

Your streets are designed to kill people.

Vision Zero started about 30 years ago, when traffic safety researcher Claes Tingvall got the idea that we didn’t have to accept road traffic deaths as a fact of life. Tingvall and his colleagues said that these deaths were not “accidents’’ but were predictable and preventable. And they set out to prove it.

One of the ways they began to protect people was to put barriers down the center of two-lane roads. They showed that this could be done cheaply. When Mylar – a strong polyester film – is supported by closely spaced plastic poles, it can keep cars from crossing the median. When the Swedes used this type of center barrier to separate the traffic going in opposite directions, they effectively prevented head-on collisions and the death rate on these roads fell by 70 percent to 80 percent.

Global health research shows more improvements can save lives. For example, Ghana put in rumble strips – small bumps spaced closely together – across all the roads leading into the capital city of Accra, reducing fatalities by 35 percent. Research has shown that speed bumps on roads are one of the “best buys” in all of global health.

Most people think we are doing all that can be done to keep our roads safe. They are wrong. Road traffic injuries kill more than a million people a year worldwide, including 40,000 a year in the United States.

Is a situation killing 40,000 people in the USA a year a health care issue? It sure seems to me it would be. It probably isn’t a disease management issue though (some might try to say bad roads are a disease but I wouldn’t say that). I think this is one, of many examples, that shows that we have a disease and injury management system not a health care system (in addition to illustrating systems thinking, effective root cause analysis, PDSA, innovation, respect for people…).

Related: Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to BlameTraffic Congestion and a Non-SolutionChecklists Save LivesSaving Lives: US Health Care ImprovementThe Economic Benefits of Walkable CommunitiesSWAT Raid Signs of Systemic FailuresSystem Improvement to Respond to the Dynamics of Crowd DisastersThe Leading Causes of Death

August 11, 2009

Don’t Hide Problems in Computers

Making things visible is a key to effective management. And data in computers can be easy to ignore. Don’t forget to make data visible. Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston recently hosted Hideshi Yokoi, president of the Toyota Production System Support Center and wrote this blog post:

Together, we visited gemba and observed several hospital processes in action, looking for ways to reduce waste and reorganize work. It was fascinating to have such experts here and see things through their eyes. Mr. Yokoi’s thoughts and observations are very, very clear, notwithstanding a command of English that is still a work in progress.

The highlight? At one point, we pointed out a new information system that we were thinking of putting into place to monitor and control the flow of certain inventory. Mr. Yokoi’s wise response, suggesting otherwise, was:

“When you put problem in computer, box hide answer. Problem must be visible!”

The mission of the Toyota Production System Support Center to share Toyota Production System know-how with North American organizations that have a true desire to learn and adopt TPS.

Related: The Importance of Making Problems VisibleGreat Visual Instruction ExampleHealth Care the Toyota Way

June 18, 2009

Community Medical Care Successes

The Cost Conundrum by Atul Gawande, New Yorker (The Power of a Checklist was published there in 2007 by the same author)

For example, Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic dominates the scene, has fantastically high levels of technological capability and quality, but its Medicare spending is in the lowest fifteen per cent of the country—$6,688 per enrollee in 2006, which is eight thousand dollars less than the figure for McAllen. Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be. In fact, the four states with the highest levels of spending—Louisiana, Texas, California, and Florida—were near the bottom of the national rankings on the quality of patient care.

I talked to Denis Cortese, the C.E.O. of the Mayo Clinic, which is among the highest-quality, lowest-cost health-care systems in the country. A couple of years ago, I spent several days there as a visiting surgeon. Among the things that stand out from that visit was how much time the doctors spent with patients. There was no churn—no shuttling patients in and out of rooms while the doctor bounces from one to the other. I accompanied a colleague while he saw patients. Most of the patients, like those in my clinic, required about twenty minutes. But one patient had colon cancer and a number of other complex issues, including heart disease. The physician spent an hour with her, sorting things out. He phoned a cardiologist with a question.

“I’ll be there,” the cardiologist said. Fifteen minutes later, he was. They mulled over everything together. The cardiologist adjusted a medication, and said that no further testing was needed. He cleared the patient for surgery, and the operating room gave her a slot the next day.

The whole interaction was astonishing to me. Just having the cardiologist pop down to see the patient with the surgeon would be unimaginable at my hospital. The time required wouldn’t pay. The time required just to organize the system wouldn’t pay.

The core tenet of the Mayo Clinic is “The needs of the patient come first”—not the convenience of the doctors, not their revenues. The doctors and nurses, and even the janitors, sat in meetings almost weekly, working on ideas to make the service and the care better, not to get more money out of patients. I asked Cortese how the Mayo Clinic made this possible.

“It’s not easy,” he said. But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible.

No one there actually intends to do fewer expensive scans and procedures than is done elsewhere in the country. The aim is to raise quality and to help doctors and other staff members work as a team. But, almost by happenstance, the result has been lower costs. [actually the Deming Chain Reaction] (more…)

May 28, 2009

CEOs Want Health-Care Reform

Decades ago Dr. Deming emphasized the deadly disease of excessive health care costs in the USA. Since then, year after year, the situation has become worse (reaching $2.2 trillion in spending in 2007 – 16.2% of GDP). During that time senior executives has put forth very little serious effort (in comparison to the huge cost) to fix this problem. Finally, in the last few years, more and more senior executives are actively moving to address the ever worsening crisis (including, Howard Schultz, CEO at Starbucks).

They seem to be realizing that hoping the problem will just fix itself is not a great strategy. Finally senior executives are realizing they need to have the government address the systemic failures. Those executives need to keep up their efforts because those seeking to retain the system that doesn’t work, because they personally benefit from it, have been doing a great job of preventing progress for decades. Until a critical mass of senior executives demand change from Washington the chance of improving the relative performance of the USA health system in comparison to other countries is very bleak (we have just been getting more expensive and less effective [relative to other countries] over time).

CEOs Secretly Want Health-Care Reform

Carl T. Camden, CEO of Kelly Services (KELYA). Managing insurance for his vast, geographically dispersed workforce of temporary workers is horrendously expensive, he complains: “My health-care costs total more than my profits.”

But in private, “CEOs overwhelmingly want out of this business,” says Benjamin Sasse, an Assistant Secretary of Health & Human Services under President George W. Bush who’s now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “They just do not want to be seen as more willing to dump [benefits] than their competitors are.” Sasse says many CEOs he has talked with would even pay a new tax if it got them out of the insurance business.

Related: Many Experts Say Health-Care System Inefficient, WastefulArticles on Improving the Healthcare systemApplying Disruptive Thinking to the Healthcare CrisisOur Failed Health-care System
(more…)

May 2, 2009

Management Improvement Carnival #62

Mark Graban is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #62 on the Lean blog, highlights include:

  • Why Quality is Dangerous (Dr. John Toussaint – ThedaCare Center Blog): “If we are going to have carrots and sticks it should be centered on what improvements healthcare organizations and providers are making every day, month, and year. Measuring and improving is how we are going to create better performance in healthcare not dictating and punishing.”
  • Beth Israel Deaconess: Systems, safety, and (avoided) severance… (Steven J. Spear – Chasing the Rabbit): “… BIDMC’s efforts to achieve perfect safety by being transparent when systems fail, using that transparency to see problems so they can be solved.
  • Going to Gemba (Paul Levy – Running a Hospital): “By witnessing problems and work-arounds in real time, the team can have a better idea of how to solve problems to root cause and make incremental improvements in work flows.”
  • Managing the Burning Platform (Mark Rosenthal – Lean Thinker Blog): “It is really easy to say that, in these emergencies, long term thinking doesn’t matter. But I contend that it is even more important right now. This is a time for action. It is not a time for panic.”
  • LeanBlog Video Podcast #2 – Kevin Frieswick, Error Proofing Handwashing (Mark Graban – Lean Blog): “I’m still experimenting with video podcasting, after my first attempt with Jamie Finchbaugh. LeanBlog Video Podcast #2 is… the video from Kevin Frieswick and MetroWest Medical Center with the device for error proofing hand washing on the way into patient rooms”

Overview of the management improvement carnival.

March 16, 2009

USA Spent $2.2 Trillion or $7,421 Per Person on Health Care in 2007

Health spending in the United States grew 6.1 percent in 2007, to $2.2 trillion or $7,421 per person.
For comparison the total GDP per person in China is $6,100. This continues the trend of health care spending taking an every increasing portion of the economic output (the economy grew by 4.8 percent in 2007). This brings health care spending to 16.2% of GDP (which is yet another, in a string of record high percentages of GDP spent on health care). In 2003 the total health care spending was 15.3 of GDP.

With the exception of prescription drugs (which grew at 1.4% in 2007, compared to the 3.5% in 2006), spending for most other health care services grew at about the same rate or faster than in 2006. Hospital spending, which accounts for about 30 percent of total health care spending, grew 7.3 percent in 2007, compared to 6.9 percent in 2006.

Spending growth for both nursing home and home health services accelerated in 2007 (4.8% v. 4.0%). Spending growth for freestanding home health care services increased to 11.3 percent. Total health care spending by public programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, grew 6.4% in 2007 v. 8.2% in 2006. In comparison, health care spending by private sources grew 5.8% compared to 5.4%.

Private health insurance premiums grew 6.0 percent in 2007, the same rate as in 2006. Out-of-pocket spending grew 5.3 percent in 2007, an acceleration from 3.3 percent growth in 2006. Out-of-pocket spending accounted for 12.0 percent of national health spending in 2007. This share has been steadily declining both recently and over the long-run; in 1998, it accounted for 14.7 percent of health spending and, in 1968, out-of-pocket spending accounted for 34.8 percent of all health spending.

The costs for health services and supplies for 2007 were distributed among businesses (25%), households (31%), other private sponsors (4%), and governments (40%).

Decades ago Dr. Deming included excessive health care costs as one of the seven deadly diseases of western management. We have only seen the problem get worse. Finally it seems that a significant number of people are in agreement that the system is broken. Still, admitting the system is broken is not the same as agreeing on how to fix it. The way forward to workable solutions still seems very difficult.

Full press release from the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Related: Many Experts Say Health-Care System Inefficient, WastefulInternational Health Care System PerformanceUSA Paying More for Health CareHealth Insurance Premiums Soar AgainPBS Documentary on Improving Hospitals

March 13, 2009

ER Checklist

The popular ER TV show highlighted the importance of using checklists in surgery yesterday.

Such powerful quality tools, like the checklist, are just waiting to be used. But far too many fail to use these simple improvement tools. And in health care those failures are potentially critical.

Related: Checklists Save LivesThe Power of a Checklistmanagement improvement dictionaryArticles on Improving the Health Care System

February 19, 2009

Applying Disruptive Thinking to the Healthcare Crisis

The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis

Christensen spies symptoms of such disruptions bubbling up in the healthcare industry, such as molecular diagnostics, imaging technologies and high bandwidth telecom, and business model innovations. Integrated health systems like Kaiser Permanente have a leg up in deploying and optimizing these disruptive technologies.

The push for widespread healthcare reform must come from employers, who in spite of their declared intent to cut healthcare costs also know “they profit when their employees are healthy and productive.” Affordable healthcare, he concludes, “doesn’t come by expecting high end, expensive institutions or expensive caregivers to become cheap, but by bringing technology to lower cost providers and venues of care, so they can become more capable.”

Clayton Christensen is the rare management thinker that I feel real provides profound insights into thinking about management. There are many other good management thinkers that offer valuable idea, just most of them (in my opinion) really are presenting material in ways that offer managers a good way to take action on all the long known good management ideas that we fail to adopt successful for decades.
(more…)

September 22, 2008

The Ergonomics of Innovation

The Ergonomics of Innovation by Hayagreeva Rao and Robert Sutton

the IHI case teaches us that innovations spread quickly when organizations focus relentlessly on selecting and spreading ideas in ways that ease the burden of thought and action for everyone involved. This mind-set differs from the one that burdens most organizations, where innovation
is seen as difficult, expensive, and protracted. The IHI staff’s ergonomics-of-innovation mind-set focused on making things easier and cheaper for everyone, including the staff itself.

IHI focused on small things that had a big impact without placing a big load on hospital staffs (reducing the number of infections, for example, hinged on frequent and thorough hand washing). In this way, the organization adopted what Karl Weick calls a “small wins” strategy.

Berwick and his team believed that simply asking hospital staffs to “try harder” to save lives wasn’t enough; people need concrete, easily learned and implemented tools.

Related: Saving Lives: US Health Care Improvement5 Million Lives CampaignPBS Documentary: Improving HospitalsHospital Reform – IHI on CBSArticles on Improving Health Care PerformanceDrug Prices in the USAposts on innovation

August 1, 2008

Management Improvement Carnival #40

Mark Graban is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #40. Mark recently authored a new book, Lean Hospitals. Health care highlights from this carnival include:

  • Hospital Error – Heparin in the news again (The Lean Thinker Blog): “I am reasonably certain that the two workers who went on “voluntary leave” (yeah, right) will absorb more than their share of blame as the system solves the problem by asking the “Five Who?” questions.”
  • Management 101, 201, 301, and 401 (Paul Levy – Running a Hospital): “The only role of management is to create an environment where people left to their own devices and unsupervised are most likely to engage in behavior that advances the goals of the organization.”
  • Why I Work In Healthcare (Lee Fried – Daily Kaizen): “Great people that were trying to work in a broken system.”
  • Competing Podcast Interview with Mark Graban (Dwight Bowen – Lean Thinking Network): “Most everyone has been aware of the increasing costs of healthcare – the general public is recently becoming more aware of the patient safety and quality risks they face in a hospital. And these are all problems that can be addressed with Lean.”
  • 5S, Poka-Yoke, and Visual Controls (Bryan Lund – TWI Blog): “I need a visual control to tell me if the standard is met, in order to avoid mistakes or failure.”

Related: previous management carnivalsCurious Cat health care article libraryCurious Cat Management Improvement blog Health Care postsimproving health care links

March 18, 2008

Drug Price Crisis

In 2005 I posted about some of the problems with drug pricing. It is nice to find at least a couple of people at MIT that want to have MIT focus research on the public good instead of private profit. As I have mentioned too many universities now act like they are for-profit drug or research companies. That is wrong. Drug companies can do so, institutions with purported higher purposes should not be driven to place advancing science below profiting the institution.

Solving the drug price crisis

The mounting U.S. drug price crisis can be contained and eventually reversed by separating drug discovery from drug marketing and by establishing a non-profit company to oversee funding for new medicines, according to two MIT experts on the pharmaceutical industry.

Following the utility model, Finkelstein and Temin propose establishing an independent, public, non-profit Drug Development Corporation (DDC), which would act as an intermediary between the two new industry segments — just as the electric grid acts as an intermediary between energy generators and distributors.

The DDC also would serve as a mechanism for prioritizing drugs for development, noted Finkelstein. “It is a two-level program in which scientists and other experts would recommend to decision-makers which kinds of drugs to fund the most. This would insulate development decisions from the political winds,” he said.

I see their idea as one worth trying. Lets see how it works. Their book: Reasonable Rx – Solving the Drug Price Crisis by Stan Finkelstein and Peter Temin

Related: USA Spent $2.1 Trillion on Health Care in 2006Measuring the Health of NationsAntibiotics Too Often Prescribed for Sinus Woes$600 Million for Basic Biomedical Researcharticles on improving the health care system

February 20, 2008

USA Spent $2.1 Trillion on Health Care in 2006

The percent of GDP spent on health care in the USA increased again in 2006 – to 16%. Health care spending reached a total of $2.1 trillion, or $7,026 per person in 2006, up from $6,649 per person in 2005.

Related: USA Healthcare Costs Now 16% of GDPMeasuring the Health of NationsUSA Paying More for Health Care

January 8, 2008

Measuring the Health of Nations

Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis

In a Commonwealth Fund-supported study comparing preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries, researchers found that the United States placed last. While the other nations improved dramatically between the two study periods (1997–98 and 2002–03) the U.S. improved only slightly on the measure.

Rankings: 1) France 2) Japan 3) Australia 4) Spain 5) Italy 6) Canada… 18) Portugal 19) USA. Maybe the United States is last but still not significantly behind?

According to the authors, if the U.S. had been able reduce amenable mortality to the average rate achieved by the three top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths annually by the end of the study period.

It might seem like a stretch to compare the lowest ranked country to the average of the top 3, but, for all those that feel the USA is the best health care system it raises the questions of why they don’t think 100,000 annual deaths is a significant enough problem to lower their opinion of the current system. And remember the USA system costs something like twice as much as the average system: up to 16% of GNP in 2006.

I must say I would rather have the Toyota mindset shown by those talking about the USA health system instead of the claims of how the current USA health system is number 1. In Toyota’s horrible last year they still had a profit of about $14 billion (I believe something like 20 companies have every made that much). The United States health system sure has some things to point to positively but the system seems to be losing ground to the rest of the world more and more quickly while many cling to a belief it is the best system around.

Related: Evidence-based Managementposts on improving health careImproving Hospital Performancearticles on improvement health careBest Research University RankingsTop 10 Manufacturing CountriesDr. Deming’s Seven Deadly Diseases of Western Management

December 14, 2007

Great Visual Instruction Example

antibiotic visual instructions

This does a great job of explaining what you need to know clearly. While this presentation for Azithromycin doesn’t prevent a mistake it sure makes it much more likely that the process can be completed successfully. We need more effort in creating such clear instructions.

Visual clarity is more important than lots of words. Applying that concept is not as easy as it sounds but it is a very important idea for instructions to end use and instructions for processes in your organization. Expecting people to read much is just setting yourself up for failure when they don’t bother (you should consider psychology, and how people will actually use your instructions not how you want them to).

via: Prescription UI

Related: Using Design to Reduce Medical ErrorsVisual Instructions ExampleVisual Work InstructionsStandardized Work InstructionsHealth Care Pictographs5sEdward Tufte’s: Envisioning Information

December 7, 2007

The Power of a Checklist

Great article on The Checklist – If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do? by Atul Gawande

A decade ago, Israeli scientists published a study in which engineers observed patient care in I.C.U.s for twenty-four-hour stretches. They found that the average patient required a hundred and seventy-eight individual actions per day, ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lungs, and every one of them posed risks. Remarkably, the nurses and doctors were observed to make an error in just one per cent of these actions—but that still amounted to an average of two errors a day with every patient.

In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert. With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident.

Yet it’s far from obvious that something as simple as a checklist could be of much help in medical care. Sick people are phenomenally more various than airplanes. A study of forty-one thousand trauma patients—just trauma patients—found that they had 1,224 different injury-related diagnoses in 32,261 unique combinations for teams to attend to. That’s like having 32,261 kinds of airplane to land. Mapping out the proper steps for each is not possible, and physicians have been skeptical that a piece of paper with a bunch of little boxes would improve matters much. In 2001, though, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try.

Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

Teams also complained to the hospital officials that the checklist required that patients be fully covered with a sterile drape when lines were being put in, but full-size barrier drapes were often unavailable. So the officials made sure that the drapes were stocked. Then they persuaded Arrow International, one of the largest manufacturers of central lines, to produce a new central-line kit that had both the drape and chlorhexidine in it.

Related: Why Isn’t Work Standard?Visual Work Instructionsposts on quality toolsEuropean Blackout not Human Error-Not

January 30, 2006

ThedaCare: Lean Healthcare

Area health systems put customer service first by MaryBeth Matzek

In 2005, ThedaCare was able to save $10 million thanks to its lean programs and officials hope to save another $12 million this year, Toussaint said.

ThedaCare’s march toward lean began when Toussaint started looking for a way to improve quality and service while cutting costs. He found what he was looking for in an unlikely place – a factory that produces lawnmowers and snow blowers.

The model Ariens used was adapted from a system put in place by Toyota, the Japanese automotive manufacturer. As part of the system, teams are formed to look at processes and find ways to improve them – whether it’s cutting out an unnecessary step or finding a better way to serve the customer.

(more…)

October 13, 2005

Seven Leadership Leverage Points

Seven Leadership Leverage Points: for Organization-Level Improvement in Health Care by James L. Reinertsen, MD; Michael D. Pugh and Maureen Bisognano.

If leaders are to bring about system-level performance improvement, they must channel attention to and take action regarding several, if not all, of these leverage points. In other words, this set of leverage points is not offered as a tried-and-true method, but as a theory-one that we hope will be useful for individual leaders in planning their work and for us in organizing a support and learning system to share best leadership practices and results across organizations; and from which all of us can learn about what works, and what doesn’t, in bringing about large-system change in health care.

Once again the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is doing a great job. This white paper does an excellent job of collecting knowledge and suggesting a way forward. And they are having an impact by getting people to participate in improvement efforts.

They have the courage to say one of the 3 sources for there hypothesis as “Hunches, Intuition, and Collective Experience.” While attempting to base plans on data and not hunches is good. Often you must make decisions without data. It is why Dr. Deming was so concerned with mobility of top management: that mobility means many managers don’t really understand what they are managing. Lean thinkers understand the value of having managers with deep knowledge of the areas they manage.
(more…)


Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog © curiouscat.com 2005-2010

Internal Links

Author

John Hunter

Tags

blogs Books Career Carnival cars commentary Creativity curiouscat Customer focus Data Deming Economics economy engineering executive pay Google Health care Innovation internet Investing IT Japan John Hunter leadership lean manufacturing Lean thinking Madison management managing people Manufacturing overpaid executives Performance Appraisal Process improvement Psychology Quality tools quote respect for people Six sigma Software Development Statistics Systems thinking tips Toyota Toyota Production System (TPS) webcast
Full tag could

Other

Search Blog

Web Search

Management Improvement web search

Recent Comments

  • Claudia: I like how people expect a methodology to “fix” poor management. It doesn’t. Six sigma or...
  • Milan Moravec: It is too early for a Performance Appraisal In Memoriam. It’s amazing that such dinosaurs...
  • shaun sayers: Nice article Jon. I think it is probably because a lot of quality professionals come into...
  • Paul Sheldon: John, sadly Hock’s advice seems to be applied in reverse too often. Automated scanning of resumes...
  • Dave Crosby: I think you’re over-thinking zero defects. In my view it doesn’t prevent or slow down...
  • Guy Farmer: Great points. It’s noteworthy how many companies still think that if they only talk at their...
  • Scott Sorheim: Great video. Love the “stop-the-line” mentality that is really similar to...
  • Scott Sorheim: My frustrations with tech support are actually how I became a programmer. I was a Mechanical Engineer,...
  • Wally Bock: Congratulations! This post was selected as one of the five best independent business blog posts of the...
  • Wally Bock: Very well stated, John. The very idea of “motivating” other people assumes that the people...
  • Wade Cartagena: I importance the Montessori method because it targets all knowing styles, provides the baby a...

Archives

September 2010
M T W T F S S
« Aug    
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
27282930