China is moving toward lean healthcare

With 10,000 hospitals the largest of which has 6500 beds, China healthcare is like everything else in the massive country. The scale is unfathomable. But as I have found visiting 11 countries over the last five years, the problems are exactly the same in China as everywhere else: the costs are sky rocketing, the quality is not reliable, and mostly not measured, and there is no transparency of performance.

China delivers most care through hospitals. There are outpatient clinics in many cities but the Chinese consider them inferior to the care they receive at hospitals. So you can imagine the bottleneck when hundreds of millions of Chinese try to get care care every day at the hospital. As is true in the U.S. when care is designed around the provider. A friend who's mother was in the Internal Medicine hospital at a large multi-hospital complex had been in a bed for 20 days. Nothing was happening. Then the friend went to the surgical hospital (a completely separate building on the same campus) and pleaded with a surgeon to come and see the patient. The surgeon on seeing the patient transferred her to the surgical hospital (wheeling the patient out the door and across the street literally) performing surgery the following day. This is the ultimate silo thinking but is not much different than American hospitals I've visited.

During our visit we were invited by the Chinese Hospital Association to deliver a session on lean in healthcare. Initially, the officials thought a room accommodating one hundred would be fine. Because of interest they moved us to a room seating 300 and it was mostly filled. After the conference many Chinese doctors approached me very excited. There is a lot of pain. With huge need to deliver better through-put at lower costs the Chinese including party leadership are looking for help.

My first book, On the Mend, was introduced in Mandarin with great fanfare. We gave out 300 books to attendees who were elated. We also visited two Chinese hospitals during the visit. These were both top notch hospitals for China. One thing was clear, they have a lot of technology. Everything from robots to iPads, but missing was standard work processes. As we know technology without process doesn't deliver better results just more expense.

China has much to gain with lean. Because of a very large burning platform(1.3 billion people) it wouldn't surprise me if they beat the U.S. to the punch.

To read the report, click here - Lean healthcare Launch in China_4