Tag: Health Care

Management Books

• Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction by Mark Graban
  

Management Articles

• Design of Experiments: An Overview and Application Example by John S. Kim, James W. Kalb
  "DOE techniques are not new to the health-care industry. Medical researchers have long understood the importance of carefully designed experiments. These techniques, however, have not been applied as rigorously in the product and design phases as in the clinical evaluation phase of product development. The recent focus by FDA on process validation underscores the need for well-planned experimentation."

• Health Care Quality: A Tale of Multiple Cultures by William J. Lambert
  "In spite of multiple, extensive efforts over the past several decades, healthcare quality the United States (US) appears to be increasingly elusive."

• Going Lean in Health Care by Jim Womack
  "Lean principles hold the promise of reducing or eliminating wasted time, money, and energy in health care, creating a system that is efficient, effective, and truly responsive to the needs of patients ? the 'customers' at the heart of it all."

• Lean Health Care? It Works! by Patricia Panchak
  "A group of Iowa manufacturing executives has already taken Jimmerson's recommendation a few steps further: They're teaming up with their health-care providers, showing them the benefits, educating them on the principles and practices, and helping them to

• A Disruptive Solution for Health Care by Clayton Christensen, Jason Hwang
  "by specifically targeting these customers who have been excluded from the traditional marketplace, disruptive business models can first establish a foothold outside the normal competitive space before moving in to compete against the incumbent firms..."

• Cost is the spectre haunting health reform by Atul Gawande
  "For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage. Those gaps have widened to become graves - resulting in an estimated forty-five thousand premature deaths each year..."

• Design of Experiments in Healthcare Delivery
  "Typically, this involves iterative testing of different factors, settings and configurations, and using the results of successive tests to further refine the product or process. When properly done, a DOE approach produces more precise results while using many fewer experimental runs than other methods (e.g., one factor at a time, or trial and error)"

• New Hips Gone Awry Expose U.S. Kickbacks in Doctors' Conflicts
  "The financial ties between device makers and surgeons help explain why health-care costs in the U.S. rose at 2.5 times the rate of inflation in the past 10 years and account for a sixth of the economy. The $300 million works out to $300 for each of the 1 million hips and knees implanted in Americans in 2008."

• William Considine embraces Lean Six Sigma to improve Akron Children’s Hospital
  "before it brought out the hammers, it asked members of the department and of the hospital's Lean Six Sigma team to review the problem. Turns out, a simple redesign of the processes and space solved the problem. No space added, no employees added, and $3.5 million saved. ... f your child needed an MRI two years ago, the waiting list at Akron Children’s was about 25 to 28 days. Through discussion with department employees and dissection of the workload, the hospital was able to add 35 MRI tests a week, dropping the wait time to three days or less."

• Robust Experimental Strategies for Improving Upstream Productivity by Ronald D. Snee
  Two methods can be used to increase the speed of upstream development, which in turn speeds up the development of process understanding: * using Design of Experiments (DOE)-based strategies to design, analyze, and interpret experiments, resulting in getting better information in a timely fashion * using Lean principles to streamline the availability of information, materials, equipment, measurements, and personnel for the experimental process, thereby accelerating the flow of the experimental process.

• Rounding for Outcomes
  "Rounding for Outcomes is the consistent practice of asking specific questions of key stakeholders—leaders, employees, physicians and patients—to obtain actionable information... The focus of questions during rounding are to: > Build relationships... > Harvest "wins" to learn what is going well... > Identify process improvement areas..."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles by John Hunter
  Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog by John Hunter
  Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...

• Lean Manufacturing Blog by Mark Graban
  News, articles and podcasts on the the lean manufacturing with a focus on health care by Mark Graban.

• Institute for Healthcare Improvement
  IHI works to accelerate improvement by building the will for change, cultivating promising concepts for improving patient care, and helping health care systems put those ideas into action. White papers available online on topics such as: Planning for Scale: Going Lean in Health Care, A Guide for Designing Large-Scale Improvement Initiatives, A Framework for Spread: From Local Improvements to System-Wide Change, and Seven Leadership Leverage Points for Organization-Level Improvement in Health Care.

• Daily Kaizen by Lee Fried
  Blog by Lee Fried tracking the journey of a world-class health care system as it continuously improves to serve its members. He works for Group Health Cooperative non-profit care system in Seattle, Washington.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections by John Hunter
  The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life. The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.

• Steven Spear by Steven Spear
  Five-time winner of the Shingo Prize for research excellence and a senior lecturer at MIT and former assistant professor at Harvard. A senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, he is the author of numerous articles appearing in academic and trade publications, including the Harvard Business Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times.

• Not Running a Hospital by Paul Levy
  Advocate for patient-driven care, eliminating preventable harm, transparency of clinical outcomes, and front-line driven process improvement.