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Advocates Partner to Push Lean Healthcare
The current plans ‘miss the underlying problem.’
By
Tonya Vinas
A new
partnership of the
Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) and a leading “lean”
hospital system aims to inject the topic of continuous
improvement into the national debate on healthcare reform.
LEI and the
ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value, a lean healthcare
advocacy group connected with an Appleton, Wis.-based
hospital system, said they want to “engage healthcare
professionals in learning
how
to cut costs while improving quality by implementing lean
thinking.”
The
partnership’s specific goals include:
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Educating healthcare professionals in lean thinking.
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Sponsoring an annual conference for networking and
sharing best practices and results.
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Providing resources through the Web site:
www.healthcarevalueleaders.org
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Facilitating learning network of committed healthcare
organizations.
“We are
partnering because we believe proposed solutions to the
country’s healthcare problems, such as electronic health
records and expanded insurance coverage, miss the underlying
problem — healthcare’s systemic waste and errors, which
drive down quality and drive up costs,” the partners said in
a statement announcing their efforts.
Helen Zak,
COO of LEI, said the partnership’s first order of business
will be to work on how healthcare is delivered, and then
expand upstream and downstream to address issues within the
larger enterprise or supply stream. Lean accounting
advocates will be pleased to know that this includes the
highly wasteful billing and insurance-processing practices
that plague the industry.
The
partnership also will work to make healthcare safer using
common process improvement tools. Already, hospitals and
healthcare professionals have proven that standard work
instruction, Training Within Industry, mistake-proofing,
and other common practices associated with the lean movement
can reduce mistakes, infections, and fatalities.
Zak said
the partnership will be announcing 15 network members in the
next couple of weeks. These are healthcare organizations
that are examples of how lean can revolutionize healthcare,
she said.
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