Taking the LEAN Approach
Avera McKennan Prepares for the Future of Health Care
Avera McKennan Hospital and University Health Center has applied the principles of the Toyota Production System, commonly referred to as LEAN, to many departments throughout the facility. After experiencing success with the principles, they began to look for a way to help other health care organizations achieve similar results. They decided to partner with their mentors, OpEx, Inc., to form a new collaboration, known as AveraOpEx.
Learn more about AveraOpEx and successes at Avera McKennan as told in MD News
New Study Demonstrates How LEAN Labs Outperform Peers
Analysis shows LEAN labs consistently do better than conventional labs
A new study provides powerful evidence that laboratories using LEAN, Six Sigma, and similar process improvement methods consistently outperform conventionally managed laboratories. Using data sets from 100 laboratories, including 14 LEAN/Six Sigma laboratories, consultant Thomas P. Joseph, of Management Insight, LLC, demonstrated that LEAN labs have dramatically improved turnaround times and consistently produce common results in less than an hour. They also have significantly fewer defects per million opportunities and operate with 40% less technical staff in key testing work cells, when compared with conventional labs. The Dark Report provides a first look at some of the significant findings of this study.
Learn more about this study by reading the entire article from The Dark Report
Patient-Centered Emergency Care - Avera McKennan Takes a LEAN Approach
by Francie Miller, Assistant Vice President for Emergency and Adult Specialty Services; Lisa Lindgren, Emergency Department Nurse Manager; and Donna Farris, Writer/Editor
Already ranking in the top decile nationally for short length of stay, the staff in the Emergency Department (ED) at AveraMcKennan Hospital & University Health Center felt confident in the quality of services offered to the community of Sioux Falls, a city of 145,000 in eastern South Dakota.
As one of two major hospitals in the city, the competitivemarket kept us on our toes. While we had
roomfor improvement,we didn’t know where to start until we began to implement LEAN principles through our hospital’s Process Excellence initiative.
During the implementation process,we asked and answered a pivotal question:“What would be the epitome of great patient care in our ED?”.
Read the entire article from Press Ganey's Satisfaction Monitor
LEAN deploys at Centrex Clinical Laboratories
By Jack S. Zito, MT(ASCP) BB, and David A. Stewart, MSIE
Many labs across the country are doing more with less. After the CEO of a New York lab visited a South Dakota operation using a LEAN solution, his professional staff implemented some successful principles.
Read the entire article from the Medical Laboratory Observer
LEAN Principles Provide Opportunities For Catholic Health Care Organizations
By Fred Slunecka, regional president and chief executive and Donna Farris, writer and editor, Avera McKennan Hospital & University Health Center
As costs escalate and insurance reimbursements lag, hospitals and patients alike are asking the same question: “Will health care be accessible and affordable in the future?” For health care administrators, a moral imperative exists to do all that’s within our power to ensure affordable health care for the future. One solution we can all pursue within our individual organizations is to streamline processes and eliminate waste.
As The Joint Commission relates, it has become common wisdom that an estimated 30 to 40 cents of every health care dollar is spent on waste — that is, on non value-added activities. While American industry has achieved a 3 percent productivity improvement every year since 1980, health care has lost productivity of 2 percent per year during that same period. No industry in the world can operate this way indefinitely.
Read the entire article from Health Progress
The Checklist
by Dr. Atul Gawande
If a new drug were as effective at saving lives as Peter Pronovost’s checklist, there would be a nationwide marketing campaign urging doctors to use it.
The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning, bombing, a burst blood vessel in the brain, a ruptured colon, a massive heart attack, rampaging infection. These conditions had once been uniformly fatal. Now survival is commonplace, and a large part of the credit goes to the irreplaceable component of medicine known as intensive care.
It’s an opaque term. Specialists in the field prefer to call what they do “critical care,” but that doesn’t exactly clarify matters. The non-medical term “life support” gets us closer. Intensive-care units take artificial control of failing bodies. Typically, this involves a panoply of technology—a mechanical ventilator and perhaps a tracheostomy tube if the lungs have failed, an aortic balloon pump if the heart has given out, a dialysis machine if the kidneys don’t work. When you are unconscious and can’t eat, silicone tubing can be surgically inserted into the stomach or intestines for formula feeding. If the intestines are too damaged, solutions of amino acids, fatty acids, and glucose can be infused directly into the bloodstream.
Read the entire article about implementing standard work in health care from The New Yorker
