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Virginia Mason Hospital

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What were reasons for implementing lean management at Virginia Mason Hospital? Lean thinking begins with driving out waste so that all work adds value and serves the customer’s needs. Identifying value-added and non-value-added steps in every process is the beginning of the journey toward lean operations. In order for lean principles to take root, leaders must first work to create an organizational culture that is receptive to lean thinking. The commitment to lean must start at the very top of the organization, and all staff should be involved in helping to redesign processes to improve flow and reduce waste. Although health care differs in many ways from manufacturing, there are also surprising similarities: Whether building a car or …show more content…

The time saved increases the time a physician can spend with a patient. Most of the cost of medical care involves clogs in the flow of information -- paper forms, lab results, phone messages, often leading to irritated patients. Two details on this list bear further explanation. The No-Layoff Policy is critical to the success of implementing lean management. People will more fully commit and engage in improvement work if they are not worried about improving themselves out of a job. Attrition, typically steady in health care, will enable most organizations to reassign staff to other necessary work. A culture shift is important here as well: Staff, especially in health care, do not typically view themselves as working for the organization, but for their individual department and/or care team. In lean thinking, the patient/customer drives all processes, and staff/providers must come to understand that they work for the patient. This means they may be reassigned depending on the needs of the patients. Secondly, the defect alert system is a fundamental element of the TPS, known as “stopping the line.” Every worker in the Toyota plant has the power and the obligation to stop the assembly line when a defect or error is identified or even suspected. Workers pull a cord, a light goes on, music plays as a signal for supervisors to come and help, and the

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