“Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.”The Perinatal Rapid Improvement Event (Kaizen) #1 begins Monday, November 29th at 11:00 AM at CCRMC Building One, Conference Room One. The overview session which is open to all is 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We have learned from other public systems such as Denver Health and New York City Health and Hospitals that Lean Management can yield tremendous results in a public system.
What's happening here at CCRMC?
Mike Rona and Patti Crome from Rona Consulting provided a three-day Lean Intensive for some members of our leadership team. You may have seen some of the teams out in the medical center and clinics participating in an exercise called a waste walk.
This was an eye opening experience for those of us who went. We went out to the clinics and hospital in search of waste. We wrote down our examples on sticky notes and placed them on a wheel based on what type of waste they were. At times it was almost laughable, until we began to see the waste literally falling off our waste wheel. Some of us did what is called a spaghetti diagram. We followed the path of workers to see where they go to get their work done. The movement was phenomenal to watch. In summary, although it was a fun and very easy exercise, it was also quite sobering.
What is Lean?
Basically, lean is centered on creating more value with less work. Lean Management is a generic process management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS). It focuses on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes in order to improve overall customer value.
Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Value is defined by the external customer and in our case it's always the patient.
Lean manufacturing is a variation on the theme of efficiency based on optimizing flow; increasing efficiency, decreasing waste, and using empirical methods to decide what matters, rather than uncritically accepting pre-existing ideas.
Why Lean and why now?
"The future is already here…it’s just not evenly distributed yet." *
Currently health care makes up about 17% of the GDP and is climbing at a steady and very unsustainable rate. In America, we hear daily debates about bailouts, stimulus packages and health reform. Although the solutions are still in the development phase it is clear we must change course nationally and it is just as clear we must do the same here at the local level. Lean Management offers a systematic way of improving efficiency while improving not compromising quality.
What's Next?
Mike Rona and Patti Crome are back at CCRMC. Work with teams of key stakeholders teams last month conducted a value stream mapping event for Perinatal Services. This mapping examined steps in our processes and weighted them in value from the patients perspective- thank you to the users of our system who gave their time to help us better understand what patients want. We will now follow this up with a series of rapid improvement events or kaizen events (also known as kaizen blitz). I know this seems like a foreign language, but that's because it is!
It feels like so much to learn, but we will learn together. Please join us tomorrow for the Rapid Improvement Event learning session from 11 am to 1 pm.
We will take one step at a time. If we fall down seven times, we will get up eight. Please ask questions and keep an eye out for updates. Anyone from the Operations Team can answer your questions so please don't hesitate to ask.
More very soon...
Anna
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment