Healthcare Case Study: Lean Health Care

Lean HealthCare Case Study By Vinay Kagalwadi Kashyap

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Whenever a patient comes to the healthcare center, the behavioral health department was taking quite a lot of lead time between the patient’s first contact and the apportment time.They had noticed mainly 2 areas of waiting time and also spotted the issue. Also the waiting list has shot upto 85 potential patients. The team decided and came up with a plan which showed a quick and impresive response and where successfully brought down in just 6 weeks. The principles of Lean is introduced to the emergency department. The Lean Healthcare Inc. convinced them to complete a current value system. This included a set of processes which had to be followed since the time patient is in and

To reduce the wastage, they took initial steps of eliminating all the old equipment’s and thus save on maintenance cost. They also hired resources who followed pull strategy so that there was no room for food to cool down. Also they gave some room for employees to pitch in their ideas, as a result they eliminated use of plastic tops and paper products that made service more ecofriendly. These things did not cost the management much, all they did was they gave much of freedom to the employees to do some value added servicing which gave a huge positive outcome to the hospital. Labs are the places where most of the hospital wastage is encountered. Thus it seemed a good area to implement and extend the Lean system. The hospital was still in a traditional approach and when they were introduced to the Value stream perspective, they were able to serve customers what they actually needed. The lead time for tests is one of the key parameter. They introduced the lean principles to reduce gap between the current and future state. They found significant improvement in the Turnaround Time. The key performance indicators were service, quality, culture and cost.

Thus they started to process in small batches. They also improved the delivery measure areas and frond 25% improvement end to end. They got a positive review with lab receiving 75% more specimens with 33% lesser staff. The staff were also reassigned employees to work on other value stream. The maintenance team introduced their 5S system. They started making best use of the materials and also found many materials which they never made use of before. The 5S system made them work independently without any consultant from outside. They also were able to work up to 120 days without any injury which was a good progress. They extended this to surgical department as well and they found a noticed of existing loopholes to be corrected. Thus they started to correct them by introducing a bunch of corrective measures. They introduced a Just in Time Chart preparations, understanding the pull from surgery, breaking the work into groups, determining the rooms required, Assigning staff to support each work, develop some standard pre surgical contacts. All these initiations brought the surgical group satisfaction and cleared many existing loopholes. Thus the Hospital