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John Toussaint, MD
John is the founder and CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value. As the Center's founder and president, John has the experience and passion to be a driving force in creating healthcare value. From 2000 to 2008, he served as president and chief executive officer of ThedaCare, Inc., a community-owned, four-hospital health system including twenty-one physician clinics, as well as home health capabilities, senior care facilities, hospice care, and behavioral health. ThedaCare is the largest employer in Northeast Wisconsin with nearly 5,400 employees, serving an eight-county region.
During his tenure as president and CEO of ThedaCare, John introduced the ThedaCare Improvement System (TIS), which is derived from the Toyota Production System. This model of continuous improvement helped save millions of dollars in healthcare costs by reducing patient errors, improving outcomes and delivering better quality care at a higher value.
Roger Gerard, PhD
Roger is the Chief Learning Officer for ThedaCare, a N. E. Wisconsin-based integrated healthcare delivery system. He has been with ThedaCare since 1991, when ThedaCare was called Novus. Roger has a career history that includes primarily significant work within the healthcare industry. However, he has also spent a quarter of his career in manufacturing and service industries nationwide. He specializes in executive and management development, process improvement, and the use of lean methodologies in bringing about significant and measurable organizational improvement. In addition, he has his own management consulting business and creative photography/illustration business that he shares with his wife, Debra.
Roger has over 35 years of experience leading executive and management development initiatives, in both large and small organization environments, focusing specifically on organizational performance improvement processes. He has presented at numerous national conferences (most recently at the Association for Manufacturing Excellence on lean in the healthcare industry), and locally throughout Wisconsin and Michigan. Roger is a member of AQP, ASQ and OD Network. He earned his PhD in Management and Applied Decision Sciences from Walden University in 2001.
If you are interested in contacting the authors, please call 920-735-7213.
Emily Adams
Emily is an award-winning journalist and writer who has developed an expertise in writing about lean transformations, among other topics. She can be found at byemilyadams.com.
"Everyone interested in medical care should read this book. It describes a way to markedly improve outcomes from medical care interventions, while simultaneously reducing costs."
"The ideas practiced at ThedaCare in Wisconsin should be adopted across the country. If they are, it will be easy to afford financial access for every citizen, because we will reduce national medical care spending by hundreds of billions of dollars per year, while improving outcomes."
- Paul H. O’Neill, former Alcoa CEO and U.S. Treasury Secretary, and co-founder of the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative
"I avoid reading business improvement books. I made an exception because this one came from ThedaCare, one of the 2 or 3 US health care organizations that consistently score at the top of national and regional rankings on BOTH quality and affordability."
"In On the Mend, John Toussaint and Roger Gerard explain simply, clearly and briefly how it was done. They use story-based prose. It can be read in a single day by a high school graduate. Its sweet logic and instant digestibility resonate with the book's topic - how to deliver more patient benefit with less time and fewer resources."
"Worried that reaching the top of national rankings on quality and affordability is unattainable by ordinary mortals? Read this book in one day. Then ask your organization's most senior physicians, most junior clerks and everyone in between to read it. Your journey will have begun."
- Arnold Milstein, MD, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Clinical Excellence Research Center at Stanford University
"We need health care that is sustainable and excellent – both. That will require rethinking our work and redesigning our systems of care boldly and guided by proper theory. These authors are masters of the change we need; under their guidance, ThedaCare has become a bright spot in the landscape of American health care. Their work and this book show that lean thinking and true patient-centeredness are not just compatible; they are, at heart, the very same thing."
- Donald Berwick, MD, MPP, FRCP, founder and former President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement
"The USA is twisted in knots debating health care payment reform, afflicted as it is with a system that is compromised in quality, affordability, and access. But for all the talk, changing payment schemes promise nothing but zero sum tradeoffs. The real potential for win win improvement is at the provider level--adoption of more sophisticated approaches to managing the delivery of care so far more value is created while requiring fewer resources and less effort."
"John Toussaint, as former CEO of ThedaCare, has demonstrated how this is done, and if his organization's approach and results were replicated nationally, we would be having health care surplus, not crisis."
- Steven J. Spear, Author of The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition, Sr. Lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Sr. Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement
"ThedaCare has become a national leader at delivering measurably better value to its patients. This book is a practical tool for any health care leader to create better patient value in health care, and begin the real process of health care reform."
- Michael Porter, Author of Redefining Health Care
