Cleveland Clinic and their lean efforts are featured in this U.S. News and World Report article with the subtitle "How the Cleveland Clinic is applying manufacturing principles to improve patient care."

From the article:

"That transformation is part of an unusual effort to bring the best practices of manufacturing to the hospital setting. Over the past five years, the clinic has assembled a 50-person team focused solely on "continuous improvement," or Kaizen, the Japanese word for "making things better." Most of the team members are engineers with experience far removed from healthcare. The efficiency experts quickly found out why healthcare isn't just another industry. Whereas higher profits might be the unambiguous goal at a corporation, doctors and nurses were not about to embrace any change that improved work flow without proof that it wouldn't lower the quality of care. "You cannot issue an edict," says team director Darryl Greene, who arrived at the clinic after a career spent improving processes at appliance makers and financial institutions. "You have to sell each doctor on the value, using data and results."

The Cleveland Plain Dealer talks with GrafTech International Chairman and CEO Craig Shular about the lean journey at the global maker of graphite industrial products and about Shular's participation in a recent kaizen event.

Spain's Mercadona supermarket chain is able to offer the lowest prices in the country while out performing comparable Spanish and foreign chains. In 2008, Mercadona's sales per square foot was 60% higher than that of France's giant Carrefour, and more than twice that of an average U.S. supermarket. The key is a relentless focus on continuous product and process improvement. And that, reports Harvard Business School, requires treating employees and customers differently than most retailers.

The link below contains an audio interview with John Toussaint, MD, co-author of the LEI book "On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry."

The first Q&A:

Q I realize that it's a few months off yet, and you probably haven't finalized your remarks, but what are some of the challenges that you intend to address in your keynote speech in Baltimore? Some of the messages you're taking with you?

A I think that this is about leadership behavior. The tools are the tools, the tools are important, you've got to learn the tools, but you can learn the tools. The hard part is the people part. What does a lean leader look like? That's what I'll be focussing on, what it takes to be an effective lean leader. It means, pretty much, that you have to change everything that you've learned in business school, or medical school, or nursing school, and you have to pretty much retool yourself, because our existing education system is turning out autocratic control freaks who manage by the numbers, and they don't know anything about quality improvement, and they don't know how to manage a group of people to actually achieve 100% reliable results. If we don't change ourselves as leaders, we will never be able to transform our companies.

Instead of requiring patients to move from department to department to receive their care, a process typical in most cancer centers, the team created the "non-moving patient" care model. In the new Frauenshuh Cancer Center at Park Nicollet, patients remain in their own comfortable room with views of a healing garden, while caregivers come to them. Services rendered in the patient's room include: lab draws, nursing assessment, physician exam, IV therapy administration and the scheduling of future appointments.

A BBC story on looming competition to Boeing's venerable 737 gives a summary of the plane's moving assembly line, patterned on lean principles. The line is a sharp departure from the traditional aircraft manufacturing methods of working on parked planes individually. The line moves at five centimeters per minute.