Univ Michigan Hospital Adopts Toyota Methods

U-M hospital takes page from Toyota [the broken link was removed] by Sharon Terlep. This continues the trend (trend rather than fad because I like that it is happening :-)) of hospitals adopting lean management methods.

In health care, the one-at-a-time approach could mean taking a patient’s call, pulling the patient’s records, scheduling a visit and performing the exam that day, rather than creating a backlog of appointments or letting people crowd a waiting room. That way, if something goes wrong, it’s easy to target where the problem happened and fix it right away.

This article gets some of the ideas down but I think presents them in a fairly confusing way. So take this for what it is a report on one more hospital trying these ideas. Then read the many available resources to learn about one-piece flow, poka-yoke, eliminating waste, identifying errors, kaizen… rather than relying on this article. The purpose of this article is just to report on the new methods being used at the hospital not provide a detailed report on exactly how the new methods actually work – that would take a much longer form of presentation than a short newspaper article.

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3 Responses to Univ Michigan Hospital Adopts Toyota Methods

  1. mgraban says:

    They are hardly "one of the first" but that's nit picking. What matters is that they are doing it!

  2. curiouscat says:

    True, I actual had a sentence saying that in my post but then deleted it 🙂

  3. Pingback: Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog » Management Improvement History and Health Care

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