lean for healthcare

The Auburn Technical Assistance Center (ATAC) offered a Lean Healthcare 101 class in Opelika, Ala. at East Alabama Medical Centers’ Health Resource Center on Feb. 10. The day-long class taught medical professionals continuous improvement through a combination of lecture, discussion, and realworld simulations.

This program for healthcare professionals is adopted from other work environments to be put to use in hospitals. The emphasis of the class is adding value, utilizing problem solving, and changing traditional business culture to lean culture.

The class on Feb. 10 was taught by a team of lean experts from ATAC, Terri Lawrence and Rick Battye. The enthusiastic pair has nearly 30 years combined experience in management and a genuine passion for teaching the fundamental principles of lean and continuous improvement to their students so they can be implemented in the workplace.

Lean can be seen as the elimination of waste, or non-value. This process can be particularly useful in the healthcare industry, where non-value time (or wasted time) averages 90 percent of total time, 20 thousand incorrect drug prescriptions are dispensed per year in the United States, 500 incorrect surgical operations occur per week, and 50 new born babies are dropped at birth per day.

Terri Lawrence, one of the Lean Healthcare 101 teachers, says “[Lean] applies easily and very well [to healthcare] because it’s basically focusing on removing waste from non-value added activities and identifying areas to improve and applying lean tools and methodology to make them better.”

Through lean healthcare, 60 to 80 percent of costs can be reduced, work and patient flow will improve, patient and non-patient processes will improve, and improvements can be made in morale, productivity, and the bottom line.

The program begins by teaching medical professionals what lean is and is not. The class emphasizes that lean is a system aimed at making the work environment move smoother and easier, not a cost-cutting strategy that makes people work harder.

The basic principles of lean are standardization of processes, visual management of work and work activities, and adding value by reducing or eliminating waste from a process. Participants in the class learned these basic principles through a series of activities, ranging from drawing to discussions to three emergency room simulations.

East Alabama Medical Center is beginning to implement lean processes in their everyday work by providing this class to the directors and managers of each department within the hospital.

“My department within the hospital does lean, we are process improvement,” said Angela Hand, a process management analysis with East Alabama Medical Center, “This training session, which is for all the individual directors and managers in our company, goes out and they have a knowledge of lean so then they know to pull our department in so we can help them make process improvement changes.”