(ASQ: Milwaukee) -- A visit to the emergency room with their daughter convinced one couple that a successful business strategy could also help to improve health care practices. Efficiency experts Aneesh and Carolyn Suneja realized that lean principles could be applied to hospital settings. The Sunejas are authors of Lean Doctors: A Bold and Practical Guide to Using Lean Principles to Transform Healthcare Systems, One Doctor at a Time. The book was released this week by Quality Press, the publishing arm of (ASQ) American Society for Quality, www.asq.org.
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Lean Doctors is a result of Aneesh’s successful lean journey with Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin. Lean is the name commonly used to describe efficiency principles that have been adapted in industries from automotive manufacturing to retail.
The 175-page soft-cover book is available online at Lean Doctors: Using Lean Principles to Transform Healthcare Systems. A free webinar on the benefits of lean in health care, which features the authors, is available on demand via the above link.
The book uses the Orthopedic Center at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee as a case study to illustrate the Sunejas’ six success steps for implementing an effective lean system in health care. The success steps—which include ideas like establishing physician flow and supporting the physician’s value-added time—“ensure that the doctor can focus solely on quality patient care,” Aneesh says.
That focus comes from mapping the process to understand where both the patient and the doctor are spending their time. Very often the physician is busy, the patient is waiting, and the perception is that there is no time left in the day to make improvements, Aneesh adds. In reality, though, a lean analysis can reveal that the physician has too many nonvalue-added tasks eating away at his or her clinic day. The patient then experiences a long wait and lower satisfaction.
Terry Schwartz, program administrator for the Orthopedic Center at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, agrees. She says that presenting the results of the mapping and data collection to the physician builds a case for change. “This is an eye-opening moment for a doctor—to see someone may have spent 60 minutes at your clinic, but only received two or three minutes of your time. It’s really something that gets their attention,” says Schwartz.
ASQ’s Quality Press is a leading publisher of quality-related books, offering resources for every level of quality professional—from quality newcomers to quality experts—across a vast array of industries. Quality Press is the publishing division of the world’s largest and most renowned quality organization.
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