St. Mary's Hospital in Apple Valley has been working on a very important problem for the community. Emergency room visits have more than doubled from 30,000 per year to near 80,000 per year in only 5 years. Utilizing the tools and principles of the lean journey for the last 3 years they have been able to free up 30% more capacity in the E.R. and have reduced the time patients wait to be admitted from the E.R. to the inpatient unit by 300% which has allowed them to see all these new visits without any significant new capital expenditure.This is just one of the impressive improvements they have made since beginning to learn the lean way,in fact they call it the St. Mary's Way and it involves their front line staff redesigning and improving the processes of care delivery.
About an hour to the south St. Joseph's Hospital of Orange Co.has done similar work in the E.R. and although the volume hasn't increased as much as St. Mary's, in the last year they have seen 9% more patients in one of the busiest ERs in California (118,000 visits /yr) without adding staff or building any new capacity.
What kind of magic is going on at St. Joseph's health system? Of course, it isn't magic at all. The leaders at St. Joe's are dedicated to 2 things: respect for people and continuous improvement. They have done a lot of work to create a culture of respect including a great employee recognition program and developing an environment where staff are encouraged to suggest ideas for improvement. This is accomplished through a management team that espouses being humble and respectful of each other and their staff. When the tools of lean are added to these key cultural components remarkable things can happen as evidenced by the above.
This is not to say St. Joe's is done or has achieved all they can or want to.To the contrary, they are humble enough to realize in many ways they have just begun but because they have the fundamentals of lean in place and the leadership commitment is strong they will continue to improve care for their patients forever. Congratulations to the staff, managers, and physicians at St. Joseph and St. Mary's Hospitals.
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