Lean or Toyota Production System (TPS) is responsible for revolutionizing the auto industry by creating highly reliable and safe cars and trucks. In this course healthcare providers, administrators, engineers, and healthcare professional students will be taught how to apply the principles and tools of Lean to health care. They will learn how to identify and remove of waste, design standardized work, apply 5S, map Value streams, create process maps, conduct rapid improvement events (RIEs), level workflow, use A3 forms and Paredo charts, apply error proofing, and create effective visual controls. The instructional videos minimize Lean technical language, and include patient cases to make the lessons more appealing to students in healthcare. Acknowledging that patients are very different from cars we have carefully adapted Lean to health care and call our system: Patient-centered Healthcare Delivery System (PHDS). The name and abbreviation emphasize two key principles taught in our course: 1. Just like PhDs the scientific method must be continually applied when creating plans to improve our systems of care. 2. All improvements must be made looking through the eyes of patients. Armed with this new knowledge students will be able to design and implement sustainable healthcare delivery system improvements.
From the lesson
Waste Reduction
Waste is a huge problem in modern health care. It has been estimated that 30-60% of all that we do is wasteful and is not of value. Lean has categorized 8 forms of waste allowing everyone on the front lines to recognize waste and work to remove it. 5S is a very helpful tool that can be used early in the implementation of lean and can remove clutter and quickly improve efficiency. A major form of waste is the excessive use of diagnostic tests, as well as delayed or missed diagnosis. In this session you will be introduced to the 8 forms of waste, the use of 5S, how illness scripts can be used to create a tiered diagnostic list, and how Bayes Theorem can be used to select the highest yield tests. Using this approach diagnosticians can more quickly and cost effectively arrive at diagnoses. Waste is the foundation of Lean and by removing waste we can progressively increase the value of patient care.