Key Points

• Lean Six Sigma seems tailor-made to help the healthcare industry.
• The ability to save lives, dollars, and improve the patient experience is a strong reason to use Lean Six Sigma.
• Hospitals that have utilized LSS have done so with great success.

Any instance in which Lean and Six Sigma are matched, like in areas like healthcare, you know there is going to be some major changes taking place. With the Six Sigma methodology already capable of making sweeping changes across different industries like healthcare, it was only a matter of time before Lean Six Sigma began to do the same.

The case for Lean Six Sigma in healthcare doesn’t really boil down to any one thing, but if you had to make a case, the whole concept of continuous improvement is where it’s at. This isn’t just a buzzword (or words) anymore, but it’s about making sure that the entire healthcare industry is constantly looking for ways to improve the overall patient experience.

The Role of Lean Six Sigma in Healthcare

There is no question that Lean Six Sigma is and will continue to play a crucial role in healthcare by helping to reduce costs, enhance quality, and improve processes across the healthcare system.

Improving Efficiency

In many ways, the role of Lean Six Sigma in healthcare is all about improving efficiency and reducing waste. After all, this is pretty much what Lean Six Sigma is all about, and it’s going to do so in a way that hopefully saves money. The goal is to eliminate any unnecessary steps that might currently be part of a healthcare flow at any medical facility.

Using Lean Six Sigma tactics, there should be a push to identify non-value-added activities in healthcare. Is something like unnecessary paperwork causing a backlog? If so, this is an excellent opportunity to utilize a business methodology like Lean Six Sigma to identify and eliminate unnecessary elements and optimize processes.

The hope and goal is that by minimizing waste and streamlining where possible, Lean Six Sigma will increase efficiency and reduce overall costs.

Quality and Patient Safety

Another big role for Lean Six Sigma and healthcare is going to be in identifying the problems that actually exist in a medical facility. Whether this is a hospital or a doctor’s office, looking anywhere for the root cause of medical errors, incorrect paperwork, or even delayed drug prescriptions is something to consider.

In a hospital, the idea of improving patient safety might be as simple as mandating hand hygiene processes. The goal is to look at every single aspect of what happens as soon as a patient enters a facility, when they leave, and to identify where there are quality or patient safety concerns.

The goal is to ensure that by focusing on quality improvements, Lean Six Sigma will make sure hospitals and doctors’ offices are more protective of patient health.

Optimizing Resources

If you are looking at how to optimize resources in a medical environment, Lean Six Sigma can help. This is one of the ways this methodology works best, as it can be applied to everything from hospital beds, patient rooms, medical equipment, and even staffing levels.

One such example would be a hospital that has found the best way to optimize the availability of open beds in its facility to reduce wait time for patients waiting to be admitted. The goal is to maximize patient capacity, but to do so without compromising other key considerations, like patient quality or safety.

Continuous Improvement

Understandably, continuous improvement is at the very top of the consideration list for any reason why Lean Six Sigma should be integrated at healthcare facilities. This entire concept is all about looking across everything and relying heavily on existing staff to identify areas for improvement.

This means getting first-hand knowledge of where staff are growing increasingly frustrated about processes, patient safety, etc., and making the necessary changes to improve patient feedback. The hope is that everyone has an opportunity to give feedback and that decisions are being made based on data that shows where and how progress is being made, based on patient and staff feedback.

The more data that can be incorporated into any continuous improvement decisions, the more likely these changes are to be sustained over the long term.

It’s All About Patient Care

According to research from the National Library of Medicine, there are approximately 400,000 cases every year of patients in hospitals that receive some kind of “preventable harm.” Similarly, approximately 200,000 patient deaths are also caused by medical errors every year.

It’s for this reason that Lean Six Sigma is taking on such a dominant role in making the necessary changes to reduce these numbers by a significant amount. Whether it’s collecting data on surgery procedures, administering medication, or improving hygiene protocols, you can see the immediate benefits of Lean Six Sigma.

The goal, as described above, is for these facilities and patient care providers to take improved processes and other adjustments seriously. If they do, there is a real and significant opportunity to reduce the number of errors in surgery, drop the number of infections that are passed around, and reduce the volume of medication mistakes that, unfortunately, take place far too frequently.

It will reduce coordinating a higher level of care at several levels, especially in a hospital, but if done right and well, National Library of Medicine reports should indicate far fewer cases of death and preventable harm. Currently, approximately $17.1 billion is consumed by healthcare budgets every year due to medical errors, and Lean Six Sigma is here to help reduce this number.

Case Studies For Lean Six Sigma in Healthcare

Valley Baptist Health System

According to reports from Valley Baptist Health System in Harlingen, Texas, this system was able to reduce surgical time in a significant way. The goal was to focus on reducing the amount of turnaround time between each surgical case, otherwise known as “patient out to patient in” and “patient in to surgeon in.”

As a result of the hospital’s efforts, it was able to handle another 1,106 cases per year, which in turn increased the potential income of the hospital by approximately $1.3 million every year. This was handled through a 15% improvement in turnaround time as well as increasing the capacity of operating rooms, which led to the additional case load being handled annually.

Kent Private Hospital

At a private hospital in Turkey, there was just enough capacity to treat only 32 patients each day, and no more. However, by applying Lean Six Sigma, the hospital was able to increase its patient capacity by 100%, or 64 patients a day. The most incredible thing is that they did it without hiring any additional staff.

To achieve this goal, the hospital completely overhauled its patient billing process and reduced the length of the discharge process. It also improved the overall handling of materials, which led to patients being able to enter and exit the facility faster.

Charleston Area Medical Center

After being founded in 1972 and serving as West Virginia’s largest medical center, the Charleston Area Medical Center had over 5,000 employees in its 893-bed facility. To help achieve its process-of-care improvements, the facility turned to Lean Six Sigma and, as a result, began to save around $1 million every year, while also improving overall patient care.

In order to find this level of savings, the hospital created recommended courses for patients and also created color-coded order sheets. These color-coded sheets were then placed in patient files to give the next provider a strong sense of the recommended level of medical care.

The staff were also given pocket cards that they had to carry with them every day as a reminder to wash their hands or put red socks on patients who might be at risk of falling.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

If you want to learn all about Lean Six Sigma and the other benefits it can bring to businesses, the good news is that there is plenty of reading material in your future. Rest assured that Lean Six Sigma can be influential in helping businesses of all shapes and sizes, including those that are in highly regulated industries.

There is also a human side of Lean Six Sigma, in which case you can spend some time reading more about how to enhance employee engagement with process improvements. If you’re a data person, this is a great time to read all about how to harness big data in Lean Six Sigma and make sure you have a complete understanding of all of the challenges and opportunities this methodology introduces.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, there is so much to look at and know just how well Lean Six Sigma and healthcare can go together. There is no question that Lean Six Sigma has brought significant improvements across the board at all kinds of levels. Whether it’s helped with patient care or helped reduce overall waste on a manufacturing floor, Lean Six Sigma is popular for all the right reasons.