Coffee, Community and Change — for the Better
I recently had the pleasure of attending an Indy Lean Coffee meeting at the Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center. The meeting was adeptly co-emceed by Mark Ryan with Franciscan Health Indianapolis and Sarah White with Indiana University Health. Christopher (Chris) Tucker and his team at the VA Medical Center hosted the event. What is a Lean Coffee? It’s really quite simple. Participants come together, brainstorm an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was collectively generated. The Indy Lean Coffee event brought together Lean practitioners from all the major health care systems in the Indianapolis area. In addition to discussing issues that are common among the teams, we were able to share some of the best practices used throughout the city. The highlight of the day was the tour of several areas of the VA Hospital led by Chris and members of his team. We were able to interact with staff members to see Lean in action, particularly in relation to direct patient care. We all came away with a greater appreciation of the work that the staff at the VA Medical Center are doing to provide care for our veterans. Over the past few years health care, and hospitals in particular, has been under increased scrutiny to cut costs and increase patient satisfaction. Through the efforts of process improvement teams such as the one at the VA Medical Center and the other organizations represented at the Indy Lean Coffee meeting, significant savings have been achieved while striving to put patient care at the forefront of these process improvement activities. I look forward to the next Indy Lean Coffee meeting to discover the new and exciting ways that Lean and process improvement tools can be used in health care. How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive...
Read MoreOperational Improvement Tips for Your Small to Mid-Sized Company
For my birthday a friend gave me a pair of gloves for surviving these rough Midwest winters where I live. They are beautiful, and very much appreciated. Inside the gloves, however, is a small tag that reads, “One size fits all.” Trying them on proved that claim to be a bit of false advertising! Thankfully my friend didn’t mind making a quick exchange for me, and now I am set for the next snow season months away. The incident made me think, though, about companies that try to adopt the “one size fits all” mentality, especially when it comes to improving business processes. Implementing process improvement programs such as Lean and Six Sigma can sometimes feel like a glove that doesn’t fit right. There are ways, though, to deploy data-driven tools like Lean and Six Sigma for smaller and mid-sized organizations that doesn’t require the massive all-or-nothing approach. It allows them to implement at a slower, more manageable pace. The strategy and projects are directly aligned to the organization’s strategic plan and customer needs. As a result, they often are more successful in achieving business improvements quickly, and on a grander scale, than their larger counterparts. Even if you are a biotech or pharma start-up or a not-for-profit with 5 or less employees, you can benefit from taking a data-driven approach to your business operations. How can I use data to be smarter about my financial projections? How should the start-up prepare itself for growth? What must be done to meet the milestones established by the investors (market)? How does a company know if it can achieve its goals? Are resources appropriately applied; is this the best ROI that can be expected? What risks must be addressed immediately? Sometimes small to mid-sized organizations don’t realize that their size actually puts them at an advantage in the market, if they can just harness their data to make smart business decisions. If you run a small to mid-sized organization, what has been your experience with operational improvement initiatives? I’d love to hear your story! If you have a business process that needs a “check-up,” please email me! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive...
Read MoreYou Can Challenge the Status Quo in Your Health Care Organization
In my work with health care organizations, it’s common to find inefficient, costly processes exist everywhere, simply because no one has ever taken the time to question the status quo. Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC) Health System in West Virginia shares a great case study in the Feb. 1, 2016 issue of the American Journal of Health System Pharmacy about how they greatly reduced drug costs by using Lean and Six Sigma tools to improve their batching i.v. medications process. The four-hospital system centralized its pharmacy compounding system in 2007 to increase efficiency. To “batch” i.v. medications, the staff would prepare a certain number of sterile i.v. products a day in certain amounts, then deliver them to the nursing units for administration to patients. While staff perceived that centralization was a vast improvement, they found with a little data collection that the medication-use process for i.v. compound making remained less than ideal. The i.v. bags filled and sent to the nursing stations in the morning often were not needed in the afternoon. A lot of waste in the process was undetected. When asked why the i.v. medication carts were only filled once a day, staff replied that it was simply “the way we’ve always done it.” There was no metrics or reasoning behind it that anyone could remember. After reviewing medication orders and administration times and zeroing in on when waste occurred, the pharmacy staff switched from fill the carts once a day to filling them five times a day. Intuitively, you might think that filling the carts more often would be more costly. In fact, the process change saved them $134,000 annually, exceeding a target of a 50% reduction. These are just a few of the ways that CAMC Health System and its pharmacy team challenged “the way we’ve always done it.” It seems very fitting that their refreshing approach earned them the coveted 2015 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for health care – another rigorous system for improving an organization’s processes.re are four tips to help you challenge the status quo at your organization: Invite different perspectives. As a leader, encourage different perspectives to examine the a long-standing process – particularly those that are closest to the work. Ask questions. Lots of them. When a staff member brings up an issue with the current status quo, use this as an opportunity to be curious and ask questions. Why has it always been done that way, and what would he/she do differently? Embrace the “d” word. “D” as in data. Gather some data and see what it shows you. Be willing to experiment. Try a solution on for size. But just like CAMC, be open to making a change if it doesn’t...
Read MoreTwo Keys to Successful Business Collaborations
From my experience as a six sigma consultant, consistency and standardization can make or break the success of a business collaboration or merger. They’re not very glamorous, but they make a world of difference. I was pleased to hear about the recent Lean Six Sigma successes of Indiana’s Pulaski Memorial Hospital when it partnered with a rural health clinic and Purdue Healthcare Advisors. At first, each organization’s different ways of working seemed to be insurmountable in this new collaborative. But gradually, by standardizing processes and being consistent, patient registration wait time dropped from 6 to 4.5 minutes on average; wait times in the diagnostic lab dropped from 19 to 5.8 minutes average; and precertification errors went from 36 down to 2 during the revenue cycle. Patient satisfactionrose from an average of 71% to almost 90%. They’ve since expanded their improvement efforts to diagnostic testing orders involving ultrasounds and mammograms. It’s encouraging to hear about organizations that have rolled up their sleeves to do this essential, albeit unglamorous...
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