Why Healthcare Isn’t Getting Better

Despite years of lean Six Sigma training, we aren’t seeing results

The United States spends $2.5 trillion for healthcare. Healthcare spending is expected to reach $4.5 trillion by the end of the decade. With Obamacare becoming a reality, we need to find a way cut the cost of healthcare to help pay for these increasing costs. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimates that $750 billion of current spending is for unnecessary testing, waste, and rework. That’s about a third of total healthcare spending.

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Lots of Lean Success

There are many pockets of Lean Healthcare success in the U.S. and around the world. We need more consistent application of Lean methods... not just in those pockets.

Most of these initiatives have nothing to do with Six Sigma, actually.

Sick Sigma

Six Sigma is sicker than healthcare. http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/six-sigma-article/sick-sigma

Quality might have half a chance in health care if people got the basics right. Teaching the Six Sigma nonsense is a guaranteed way to fail. It's time to get back to Deming.

Stop trying to make Healthcare into Toyota

If there is one disease we have in the US it is the mass production mindset that Deming warned us about long ago. Lean helps us copy the industrial tools of Toyota while hospitals have different problems. Six Sigma gives more analysis when we are already over-analyzing and complicating our systems. We have a huge thinking problem in this country . . . a bankruptcy if you will. Until we address this problem we have no where to go but to seek the bottom.

Lean isn't just Tools...

Lean is proving successful, I should clarify, in the organizations that realize Lean is a management system, a philosophy, a way of thinking, etc.

I agree that a new way of thinking is necessary... building on the lessons of Dr. Deming, of Lean/TPS (Deming was a huge influence on Toyota)...

See ThedaCare, Virginia Mason, Seattle Children's, St. Elisabeth Hospital (the Netherlands) and many others that have shared their new thinking via Lean... the hospitals that are just copying industrial tools will struggle.

Do we really need other Heroes?

Or do we need just honest, reliable workers? And the tops - leaders and managers - at an equal level? It's true: millions are spent in "tools" like Six Sigma - or, more realistically "wasted" in such "toys". What's really worrying is that key social issues like Healthcare and Education are worldwide considered just as the ancient Romans' "cloaca maxima". Thank you.