|
|
|
01/03/2011 10:11 AM
|
|
|
With lean healthcare being relatively new, we are having a hard time finding people with lean and healthcare experience. I was wondering how other healthcare organizations are dealing with this issue; are they training healthcare professionals on lean from within or recruiting lean talent from the outside realizing that there will be a learning curve to understand the healthcare system? Also, is there some kind of network for lean healthcare professionals looking to explore new opportunities?
|
|
|
|
|
01/07/2011 09:51 AM
|
|
|
Mayo Clinic has a solid lean and six sigma program supporting clinical operations throughout the US. ASQ, LEI, Yammer and Linkedin are all good places to network with other lean heathcare people by joining specific groups within each site. Whle lean in heathcare is relatively new in many clinical settings there are many "transplants" from manufacturing that have found success in applying lean and six sigma methodologies to healthcare settings.
|
|
|
|
|
01/07/2011 12:01 PM
|
|
|
A_M
I currently work in healthcare implementing Lean practices. The approach at my organization has been a mixed one - I have my Master Black Belt training completed and there is another MBB at this hospital as well. Both of us came from the Automotive Industry. Although the industries and organizations we came from were completely different, the concepts and training are still applicable. Our organization has also been training individuals within the organization using external resources. Yes it does take time to get acclimatized to the Healthcare Industry, however, in my experience, the perceived differences are not as stark as some might think.
|
|
|
|
|
01/07/2011 12:20 PM
|
|
|
We're doing both. We have an internal lean training program for healthcare practitioners but we have also hired people with lean experience from other industries. It takes non-healthcare people 6-12 months to get comfortable in the health care environment. Regarding networking, the Society for Health Systems, a subsidiary group of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, is a good organization. They have a YahooGroup, search for HME.
|
|
|
|
|
01/09/2011 12:36 AM
|
|
|
Are you looking specifically for people who already have lean healthcare experience or are you willing to consider experienced lean people from outside of healthcare?
|
|
|
|
|
01/11/2011 09:52 AM
|
|
|
Tthe combination of a heatlhcare background and lean process improvement skills is growing slowly. If you are looking to recruit talent, look specifically to healthcare systems that have had sustained success and have invested in training both staff and leaders.
You may also choose to use independent consultants to effect specific meaningful changes while simultaneously training and developing internal staff in lean thinking, tools, and processes. I agree with the previous comment that lean experts from other industries can be effective in healthcare, but there is a communications and learning curve. I have a medical laboratory background and in my lean healthcare projects, I have had acceptance and credibility with physicians, nurses, clinic staff, sterile processing staff, laboratory technologists and others bcause we have all worked in providing patient care services.
|
|
|
|
|
01/20/2011 02:54 PM
|
|
|
In my opinion, I think someone with Lean experience outside healthcare has a shorter learning curve than that of a Healthcare worker learning about Lean.
Attention, though - we've hired some 'Lean managers' who have not been 'hands-on' enough and not having knowledge that is deep enough. Main thing is that the person cares both about Lean, his/her customers and their processes.
|
|
|
|
|
03/03/2011 02:16 PM
|
|
|
We all need more Lean training! improvement is the goal. But in healthcare the learning curve is vast for new transfers.
I am teaching a 'Lean Informatics in Healthcare' training for nursing informatics professionals.
All ideas are greatly appreciated from all of you Lean healthcare gurus!(i.e. suggestions, tips, games, resources, case studies)
Thanks!
|
|
|
|
|
03/07/2011 12:37 PM
|
|
|
Hello Ahmad,
In my opinion, and what my last 20+ years of consulting/contracting in Lean/TPS has taught me is that;
1. Lean is Lean.
2. It is not specific to any particular industry.
3. It is not product/service technical in nature.
4. Some one that can help you with Lean/TPS needs only to understand Lean/TPS.
They don't need to know healthcare.
You already have all the healthcare experts working for you. What you don't have is someone looking at the non-technical aspects of your business (i.e. process flow, waste, etc.). You need to hire/contract someone with a track record of Lean transformation. A Guru for your organization. Find out what other Lean/TPS projects the Guru has done in their life. Check references. Lean/TPS certifications are OK for your people to help shorten the learning curve but the real learning comes from the "On Floor" transformations you experience as a group. Keep in mind it's the things that "YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE DO" that will change your organization, not what the Guru does. Guru is only the guide. You and your people are the ones that must learn to walk the walk.
Randy Drozd
Kaizen Consulting
|
|
|
|
|
03/08/2011 10:39 PM
|
|
|
I am from the Health Insurer side and am the Lean/Six Sigma Deployment Executive. We have taken a similar approach as others who have already commented. Our approach has been to mix high potential internal talent (that we have trained), experienced Lean / Six Sigma professionals from across many industries, and newly graduated MBA's or Industrial Engineers with Greenbelt training. This mix has allowed us to have the most flexibility and agility to solve business problems using the Lean/Six Sigma tool kit. The biggest learning curve is the culture and we spend a great deal of time mentoring the new staff and pairing them with the internal talent to build the critical relationships necessary to traverse the company.
Health Insurers are closely matched in terms of culture to the hospital and care delivery side of healthcare, so you could always recruit there and then have talent that could work the Administrative side where I know there are huge gains to be made using Lean Principles.
I would strongly suggest that you look for talent first, and those that can adapt to your culture with strong change leadership skills, more so than the industry expertise. The best part of having a diverse team is that we have more experience to draw from and can drive better outcomes for the organization. Good Luck!
|
|
|
|
|
03/21/2011 12:47 PM
|
|
|
Speaking from the other direction, what is the best way to become the talent. I have recently been promoted to middle management as our hospital begins it's lean transformation. I have worked in the ED for the last twenty years. My yellow belt training starts soon and the plan is to have me certified to green belt by the hospital's outside lean consulting company. I have read now eight books on lean and am on my ninth. Any thoughts and advice? In the next few years I will gain a good deal of hands on experience as well, while helping my team evolve and improving the work
|
|
|
|
|
03/25/2011 12:00 PM
|
|
|
Congratulations - you have a great opportunity. Let's consider the world's best learners:
- children have natural curiosity and inquisitiveness, unabated by shame or ridicule,
- students internalize instructed principles, then debate and test them for veracity,
- problem solvers seek mentors, for they cannot live long enough to make the same mistakes as everyone else.
So to learn like the child, grow like the student, and gain wisdom from a mentor you will need support things in your learning plan. You seem to have natural curiosity, as evidenced by the question, so how do you plan to feed the need, without becoming a distraction to others? Training classes and book can provide rote knowledge however, many things you will learn in any given class might fail to produce a valuable result. What will you do to separate the essentials from the exceptions? And to become like Plato, you will need your Socrates - where will you find him/her and how will you gain sufficient access? One hour per month might be sufficient if you are already an expert and need a challenge, but without concentrated mentoring time you will be doomed to wallow in learning the hard lessons alone and making all the world's know mistakes yourself - so limiting potential.
The plan and the choices are yours.
Best of Luck,
Walt Tarpley, LSSMBB
Healthcare Practice Leader
Productivity Healthcare
www.leanhealthcareconsulting.org
|
|
|
|
|
03/25/2011 12:41 PM
|
|
|
Lean Principles are universal. Translation of principles of Lean into a given environment requires shifting a learner's paradigms. Must one first learn how to make an Automobile before we could teach them Lean? This is true when the teacher does not understand the environment of the learner, and how to translate principles into their environment. Many healthcare providers have implemented lean concepts, those need to be integrated into learning.
Potential learners cannot receive information and process it as truth when their natural defenses indicate unacceptable risk. It is a mistake to put a light jacket on your child when playing in the snow for ten minutes; it is also a mistake to attack a Kodiak bear with a pocket knife. Consultants are people and allowed to learn new environments, however we are not allowed to increase client risks or delay their results because of our ignorance, as that is irresponsible. Smart clients will look for those with industry experience first, then only when that does not exist they can look outside for other benchmarks.
Healthcare applications of lean are different in that the thing flowing through the process is a person, not a widget or a transaction. Differences in outcome risks, terminology, and process interconnections create a unique environment that makes the inexperienced unaware of consequential effects. Lean consultants are not usually de-facto subject matter experts in how to perform any medical procedure, we are expected to provide wise counsel for our clients within our boundaries of expertise. This means given two equal consultants, the one who knows an environment provides the same result faster. Not every client is willing to pay for a consultant's education.
Walt Tarpley
Healthcare Practice Leader
Productivity Healthcare
|
|
|
|
|
03/25/2011 02:46 PM
|
|
|
You are correct, talent is an issue. Most hospitals are choosing to build their own talent, for many reasons. Simply buying a few practitioners has proven to be insufficient for most hospitals. Understanding the environment requires time, however, the more significant gap is a lack of organizational relationships based on trust required to create transformation. Training and mentoring internal people through a consulting partner seems to allow the whole organization to learn to move forward together.
To become lean you will need four things:
1. Ways to evaluate organizational readiness, including change readiness, leadership processes, measures and rewards, and strategic likages.
2. Navigational systems to plan and deploy strategies, execute and review work, management processes to review and adjust course.
3. Stabilization skills to create consistency in outcomes, standardize work and its flow, eliminate environmental sources of error, create management infrastructure for sustaining and growing improvement culture, and create actionable operational measures.
4. Transformational skills and infrastructure to identify and improve wastes of time, effort and money.
You will need all four for long term success. Failing to address any area will leave gaps which undermine creating thlasting change.
Walt Tarpley
Healthcare Practice Leader
Productivity Healthcare
|
|
|
|
|
03/25/2011 05:19 PM
|
|
|
Marlon,
I recently completed the Ohio State University executive masters degree program in business operational excellence. It was a year-long program with 8 sessions on campus. It was the perfect mix of book learning, project learning, didactics, gemba visits, and lots of lectures from Lean Six Sigma "rock stars". Along the way you will obtain Black Belt certification as well. They will be starting a healthcare specific MBOE class next year, but I felt I gained a lot from my classmates in industry.
I don't know where you live, but we had classmates from Maine, New Jersey, Chicago, and Wisconsin. It would take a financial comittment, but you would have a recognizable credential along with your new hospital experiences.
|
|
|
|
|
03/31/2011 09:54 AM
|
|
|
Hello Marion, Walt and Trauda, and others - Excellent and helpful discussion.
I'd like to to ask about the role of Lean Methodology in a small business health services start up. I have owned and operated several small assisted living facilities over the last 20 years going from 9 beds to 72 beds. I am now starting a new one. While writing my plan for this business I was taking a fairly radical departure to the conventional model and looking to not retrace the same faulty steps of such conventional facilities, I discovered Lean ! Holy cow! (Read: On the Mend)
Along with others in my end of the universe (Eden Alternative / Beacon Hill model ) I am determined to support our trend toward culture change in the care for the elderly. I want a successful Lean start up philosophy pre-loaded in my business plan. Of course aside from my own money I will need investors and other resources. I also will need to both explain lean conciousness (we we will always be searching for better answers) to prospective team mates (partners/staff) and to risk-adverse advocates and investors.(why invest with you when you say you don't know all the answers ?)
Naturally since I own the company I am constantly boning up on the topic but what is the best way to move ahead with a small lean health care start up? I don't have a lot of time to waste :)
Best regards for a helpful debate!
|
|
|
|
|
03/31/2011 03:49 PM
|
|
|
Hello Ahmad,
I am a Lean Consultant at a hospital. I have over 10 yrs of experience in the lean/quality world and most of it was in the aerospace industry (prior to healthcare). My recommendation would be to search for someone that knows the Lean concepts and has experience with transitioning an organization to utilize such skills (if they have a healthcare background...great, but don't let that limit your search). The beautiful thing with Lean is it's all about the process (most of which are business-type processes within healthcare vs. hard-core manufacturing processes). Look for candidates that have experience with business processes (not just manufacturing). The healthcare part can be learned with a short learning curve through a few good Lean healthcare books and/or research articles.
Best of luck with your search!!
|
|
|
|
|
04/04/2011 05:08 PM
|
|
|
David,
Lean is as important at start up as any other time. Excellent design at the outset may cost 5% of the total project/process cost but that 5% casts the longest shadow. Changing a design when you are 50% complete costs a great deal more that doing it right at the outset.
I would look at Design for Six Sigma. Helps see future needs and translate them to current realities as well as a look at the KANO Model that translates customer needs to design criteria.
Our experience with the application of lean tools in healthcare, especially skilled nursing facilities, assisted living and independent living, is the simpler the better. Staff involvement is crucial. Teach your staff to use the tools. They know where the waste is lurking. Good luck.
Andy Masson
|
|
|
|
|
04/22/2011 04:58 PM
|
|
|
Having worked in an healthcare organization that brought in non-healthcare people to implement lean, I would say the experience with consultants varied, depending on the individual's ability to listen with open mind, rather than dictate lean rules. We wasted 100's of hours with people who instead of listening to the subject matter experts and adapting, dictated rules rigidly, and then complained about our level of engagement and process.
Shared services in particular seemed to stop most of the consultants cold. They just couldn't get their arms around the notion that services like market research, office admin, IT, business analytics - exist to support the business needs of the org. Internally, within work units we could standardize some processes, but our workflow came at us from multiple sources that did not have standard work - and their work requests to us arose from non-standardized processes.
I would say that about 15% of the consultants were good listeners, and confident and adept enough at lean, that they could hear our questions as legitimate and, not as complaints. That was the other surprise to me - that some consultants were too inexperienced to confidently and creatively adapt concepts.
Since then I've come to understand what they (and we) were up against - we were tackling cross-functional processes too soon because our organization took a cookie cutter approach to implementing lean, rather than carefully staging the work. Another weak spot that created similar disconnects was that as new leaders came on board, they were insufficiently trained in lean which compromised their credibility and effectiveness.
Happy Trails -
Diana
|
|
|
|
|
04/25/2011 10:01 AM
|
|
|
Thanks Trauda. i am in Montreal, Canada. I am still pushing for a company like Leanhealthcare west to come in and train us to green belt and then look for black belt certification on my own if necessary. right now, in my department I am one of the few with a good deal of knowledge on lean (as limited as it is), so I have a good chance of getting hooked up with training and a mentor. The main goal is to help the ED succeed in this transformation
Respectfully,
Marlon
|
|
|
|
|
>
Community >
Forums
Send to a Friend
