Health Care Category
A Case Study in Outpatient Registration Overview of Project For a seven week internship between my junior and senior year at Saint Vincent College I was placed in a local hospital’s outpatient registration department. At this particular hospital, registration took place in it’s own department, which registered for different areas such as radiology, CAT scan, and other outpatient areas. Over my time there I grasped and mapped out the current situation, trained the team in problem solving and the eight wastes, worked with that team to make future recommendations, and piloted the recommendations...
Healthcare Horror Stories Healthcare Horror Stories Background Death accidentally and unnecessarily happens all too often in the places where our lives are supposed to be saved. “It is only after a patient dies or suffers a serious injury that the type of mistake and the factors contributing to it are subject to serious scrutiny.”[1] The previous example typifies that the culture of the majority of healthcare organizations in America today. Simple mistakes are made in organizations that could be resolved by defining roles and responsibilities, by unambiguous labeling of materials, and...
Date: 08 Sep, 2010
Posted by: David Adams in: Coaching Stories | Health Care | Lean | Operational Excellence
Safety System: the KCOE System’s Version I’ve had a client ask a great question about the relationship between the KCOE System’s Safety System (or, sub-System, if you will). First, I will make a gross assumption that most of you reading this article know what an OSHA Safety Compliance Audit is and how it serves the organization. These audits may be done through self assessment or by outside consultants or by any combination of the two. In our Operational Excellence language, these audits tell you the current state of OSHA compliance in your facility. The report will...
September’s Healthcare Networking session will take place on September 23 from 5pm to 7pm at Saint Vincent College (map) in Latrobe, PA. The topic will be an introduction to Toyota Culture by Jeffry Liker and Mike Hoseus. We will review some material on cultural models and cover Chapter One in the book. Chapter One introduces Liker and Hoseus’s method for understanding the cultural underpinnings of a world class production system and the value stream which produces high quality people and culture. Dr. Rick Kunkle will be presenting some of the material, but we hope that you would...
Date: 04 Aug, 2010
Posted by: David Adams in: Coaching Stories | Health Care | Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence | Results
I’m a big fan of NBC’s Tuesday evening show, The Biggest Loser. If you’re not familiar with the format, the storyline goes something like this: obese contestants spend multiple weeks at The Ranch in order to lose 30% or more of their body weight. The draw of the show is the human dilemma in which we just can’t make phenomenal change without the aid and support of other people. The contestants (it is a contest to see who will lose the most weight) are guided on this journey by Trainer Bob Harper and Trainer Jillian Michaels. So, here’s the thing: you can’t...
Date: 31 Jul, 2010
Posted by: David Adams in: Health Care | Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence
Assuming that all of us would answer that question differently and that we would most likely say that we are doing OK, but are not yet world class, we need next to consider the gap between our current condition and ideal and develop what I call the target condition. Let’s face it: we won’t become world class overnight. It takes time and a lot of hard work. We shouldn’t just shrug the shoulders and go back to business as usual, as comfortable as that may be. Rather, we need to develop a target condition, one that we develop while aiming at the ideal, world class. Before we do that, however,...
One of the most common “push backs” I encounter as an Operational Excellence coach is when we first introduce simple, individual, “five why” problem solving. I encourage my teams by telling them not to worry about solving problems; I tell them to just fill out problem solving sheets. Lots of them. Shortly, a top leader will take me aside and tell me that I really didn’t mean that…did I? Of course I did! Why would I want them to solve problems when the organization doesn’t have a simple, standard problem solving tool? How will we ever make quantum...
(This is the fourth installment from a speech given at SMC Business Councils a few weeks ago. You can see the previous installments by clicking this SMC Speech tag. The result will give you all the posts.) Around the time when Womack was publishing the first version of Lean Thinking, the seminal Toyota plant in North America, the one they built in Georgetown, Kentucky was celebrating its tenth anniversary. Some of its earliest leaders were moving on to different and new seasons and careers. Some of those early leaders went on to show organizations how to implement the Toyota Production System. ...
(This is the third installment from a speech given at SMC Business Councils a few weeks ago. You can see all the installments by clicking this SMC Speech tag. The result will give you all the posts.) Where would one look for the things that we need to do to eliminate waste? Well, because Womack’s system was presumably extracted from Toyota, one has to look at the source. In droves, we flocked to see what Toyota was doing. And we saw a lot, didn’t we? We saw cellular manufacturing, we saw the artifacts of pull systems – kanbans, we saw a pull cord that triggered a light and...
