11.06.2014

Lean is the Medicine that Healthcare Systems Require

Last month, an important book titled The Lean Prescription: Powerful Medicine for Our Ailing Healthcare System, authored by Patricia Gabow and Philip Goodman, was published, and it details how Denver Health became the first healthcare organization to be awarded the Shingo Bronze Medallion Prize for Operational Excellence. 

I had the chance to speak with Patricia about her book, and one of the main questions I asked was: "Why should healthcare organizations choose Lean as a methodology to transform and improve their culture and results?" Here is her complete response: 

Let me go back one step from this question and first answer an even more basic question, “Why must healthcare organizations transform at all?” Pondering this question is what led me to Lean. There is a national-level answer and an organizational-level answer to this question. I contend that the USA doesn’t have the best healthcare system in the world. Fortunately, both the state and federal governments are taking a wide array of steps to begin to address the issues of coverage, cost, quality and care co-ordination. But the fruits of the policy changes will only occur if individual healthcare systems are transformed. 

My 40 years in healthcare, first as a practicing physician and then as an administrator, convinced me we needed transformation at an organization level. Standing in any clinic or any hospital unit tells you we are basically doing things like we did when I was an intern more than 40 years ago -- we have new drugs and new technologies, but most of our processes are the same. We need transformation in all our healthcare institutions and that will require clear (and new) methods to achieve it. We must identify, prescribe, and administer some powerful medicine to the system. 

I think Lean is that medicine. The power of Lean lies in the fact that it is both a philosophy and a tool set. The Lean philosophy teaches us that transformation is built on the two pillars of Respect for People and Continuous Improvement. These should always have been the pillars of healthcare. Even if healthcare had to wait for an automobile manufacturer to teach us this, we can embrace it. 

In my decades in healthcare, I, as others in healthcare have tried many approaches to reducing cost and increasing quality. Lean was the most powerful approach I had ever seen. There are few, if any other, approaches that hit the target on quality, cost and employee empowerment. 

For example, other approaches that reduce costs at best can hope to keep quality the same and keep employees neutral about both the process and outcomes of the cost reductions. Because Lean focuses on getting rid of waste that shouldn’t have been there at all, its focus can’t be argued about -- who wants to defend waste? Because Lean is built on respect for people, the Lean tools that let us see and eliminate waste can be used by every employee. You don’t need a PhD to use an elegantly simple tool like a spaghetti diagram. Every employee becomes an engaged problem solver. We gain an army of problem solvers -- it is no longer just up to executives to make our systems better. 

While these are the intellectual reasons why Lean is the methodology for healthcare organizational transformation, the real “proof is in the pudding.” At Denver Health we realized over $192 million of hard financial benefit, achieved outstanding quality such as having the lowest observed to expected mortality of all academic health system members of the University Healthsystem Consortium and having 83% of our employees say they understood how Lean helped us maintain our mission. Lean is the method that hits the bull’s eye on cost reduction, quality of care, and employee engagement. How could you not use such an approach? 

What do you think of Patricia's thoughts on the power of Lean to transform health systems? I'd particularity like to see comments from those in the healthcare sector who are currently part of a Lean initiative.