Traditional healthcare management needs an overhaul. Medical errors have become a norm and costs continue to escalate. A new management philosophy is emerging at a few NHS Trusts. Recent research has shown that operational excellence, the management approach described in this article, leads to improved patient cost and quality outcomes. However, it requires healthcare leaders […]
Abstract: It is well known that health-care performance is highly variable and not reliable. To address this issue, a number of health-care leaders have been experimenting with operational methods derived from non–health-care industries. Leaders at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, Stanford Children’s Hospital at Stanford, and ThedaCare have been studying and applying principles from consistently high-performing […]
Quality improvement (QI) methods have been introduced to healthcare to support the delivery of care that is safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and cost effective. Of the many QI tools and methods, the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle is one of the few that focuses on the crux of change, the translation of ideas and intentions into […]
Given pressures to control costs and improve quality of care, one of the most prevalent transformational performance improvement approaches in health care is Lean management. However, the roles of support functions such as human resource (HR), finance, and information technology (IT) in Lean management and the relationships of these support functions with performance are unknown. […]
A number of health systems have scored impressive gains in improving outcomes and patient satisfaction and lower costs by applying the Toyota Production System (TPS) to redesign “lean” clinical and administrative processes, eliminating waste and boosting quality. But in all too many cases, when the leader who championed TPS left his or her organization, these efforts began […]
Catalysis CEO, Kim Barnas, spoke with a writer for a healthcare magazine in Germany about what Operational Excellence means. The following is the transcript of that discussion. Question 1 Many people would claim they have a general understanding of the terms quality improvement and operational excellence in healthcare, but when it comes to specifying the […]
Building and sustaining continuous improvement – global lessons from the front line. At a time when healthcare faces growing challenges globally, KPMG International set out to learn how leading healthcare organizations around the world are successfully building and sustaining a culture of continuous improvement. This report includes interviews with Catalysis and twenty healthcare leaders that represent […]
Organizational culture is the essential element in meeting health care goals, according to Stephen Swensen, MD, Professor Emeritus at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. “Culture, more than anything else, drives performance,” he says. “Culture is the way in which organizations make decisions about what they […]
Mark Granabn’s Lean Blog Episode #338 is Mr. Grey Dube, the Chief Executive Officer at Leratong Hospital. He has over 40 years’ experience in the public service, including time as CEO at the hospital since 2005. Leratong Hospital is an 855 bedded regional hospital with over 1700 staff members, located in Mogale City, Krugersdorp, South Africa (just […]
“Chaos in the emergency department is common. How to fix it is not always clear. Mary P. Mercer, MD, MPH, from the University of California, San Francisco, discusses how they successfully fixed their long dwell times at the emergency department at San Francisco General Hospital. Their solution was to create a fast-track unit that managed low-acuity […]
