Chairman's Post: Insights on This Week's Poll

Last week's poll results: Almost two thirds if survey takers in US Hospitals report that their institutions have not yet adopted a Lean management techniques. About half are planning to do so.

What is Lean? "Beginning in the late 1990s various healthcare systems began deploying Lean Six Sigma in order to reduce costs and drive performance improvement, " explains Ed Popovich, PhD, Lean Six Sigma expert, MX.com Senior Advisor and President of Sterling Enterprises International. “Lean Six Sigma is both a leadership philosophy driven on rapid change and a roadmap for improvement and innovation in process and system performance.”

While Lean is only one of several “value creation through efficient operations” tools, it has become closely linked in the literature of health system improvement (oftentimes as Lean Six Sigma) and it is somewhat surprising that the reported rate of adoption is not higher.

Readers can find good resources in several places, such as:

• Going Lean in Health Care. IHI Innovation Series white paper. Cambridge, MA: Institute for Healthcare Improvement; 2005. (Available on www.IHI.org)
• And AHRQ’s Reducing Waste and Inefficiency in Health Care Through Lean Process Redesign Literature Review