Making Hospitals Work

Book excerpt: A Lean Action Workbook from the Lean Enterprise Academy, a affiliate of the Lean Global Network and the Lean Enterprise Institute For the first time, Making Hospitals Work provides a practical road map for healthcare leaders seeking to create truly lean hospitals. It outlines a clear framework for focusing improvement activities on the most important challenges facing each hospital. It uses the same evidence-based, scientific method as clinicians use to diagnose and treat medical problems to analyze and redesign the core emergency and elective patient journeys from arrival to discharge. It opens everyone's eyes to the big win-win-win opportunities to eliminate unnecessary waiting time for patients, to synchronize activities so clinical staff can spend more time caring for patients, and to free up capacity by reducing length of stay and cut the overtime and agency budget. It also introduces the key new role of the value-stream manager in gaining agreement on what needs to be done by whom in every department across the hospital. Every step described in Making Hospitals Work has been tried and tested in the three years' action research that led to this workbook. It is the critical breakthrough to take the next steps on the lean healthcare journey.