Key Points

• Lean Six Sigma and healthcare can be the perfect match when appropriately implemented.
• The hope is that this business methodology can help eliminate waste and deliver improvements that are built to last.
• The goal of Lean Six Sigma is to improve patient care, leading to increased patient satisfaction.

One of the biggest considerations for any medical facility is not just how to get patients seen with care, but how to get them in and out as fast as possible. The good news is that increasing patient flow isn’t mutually exclusive with patient care; it’s more about helping patients get seen as fast as possible when they walk in the door.

For hospitals, in particular, the slow flow of patients from admission to discharge can cause significant delays. These delays might exist as medical errors, poor outcomes, or bad treatment, but one way or another, there is a concern that slow intake and discharge leave a lot of room for improvement.

What Is Lean Six Sigma?

If you’re working in a field focused on eliminating waste, whether in healthcare or manufacturing, Lean Six Sigma is arguably the best approach. This data-driven business methodology is among the most popular that can be introduced into an organization today, alongside other options like Value Stream Mapping, Hoshin Kanri, Kaizen, etc.

Originating with brands like Motorola and Toyota, Lean Six Sigma has made its way to healthcare thanks to the structured methods it has in place to boost both efficiency and quality. In other words, for hospitals and similar industries, Lean Six Sigma is designed to help transform what might be an existing chaotic process into something that is more streamlined and high-quality.

Using the DMAIC framework of Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control to improve processes, the goal with Lean Six Sigma is to reduce the amount of defects to 3.4 defects per million opportunities. In other words, for healthcare, that would mean that only 3.4 patients out of one million would suffer from such a negative experience.

Ultimately, the reason why any healthcare facility would choose Lean Six Sigma is that it can cut down on waste, improve quality by lowering errors, and enhance patient satisfaction by delivering faster service. In addition, Lean Six Sigma keeps the door open for Continuous Improvement so that there is always room to deliver even better patient care.

Lean Six Sigma and Healthcare are a Perfect Match

Healthcare Synergy

As you start to dive deeper into the whole synergy between Lean Six Sigma and healthcare, you can quickly see how there is plenty of synergy between these two ideas. It won’t come as any surprise to learn that healthcare is a complex and high-stakes environment that can almost immediately benefit from the more data-driven approach of Lean Six Sigma.

In fact, it might be the perfect system to help tackle inefficiencies like longer wait times or medication errors, as well as improve patient safety and satisfaction scores. Beginning in the 1990s, we really started to see hospitals begin to adopt Lean Six Sigma to help combat an era of rising costs, all while seeing a rise in patient demands. Early on, these initial launches in hospitals helped reduce surgical delays and improve patient turnover.

Unique Strengths

Pairing healthcare with Lean Six Sigma reveals numerous unique strengths, enabling it to thrive in the dynamic environment and challenges of healthcare. Best of all, there is a lot of encouragement across the staff, everyone from nurses to administrators, to help contribute ideas on their own, which is one of the most unique advantages of Lean Six Sigma.

The more involved the staff is and the more a rollout is collaborative, the more likely it is to be successful, as well as reducing errors. If everyone is accountable for change, then it’s something everyone will work on adopting, even if it’s just to ensure no one is singled out as the lone wolf holding up the positive changes from truly taking shape.

Patient Flow Concerns Are Real

Bottleneck Concerns

In any healthcare facility, a hospital being the number one focus, bottlenecks are common, especially when you look at an emergency room. For anyone who has ever been in an emergency room, there is often a wait, which can be incredibly frustrating, especially if you are in pain, feeling uncomfortable, or fear something worse is going on with your body.

In fact, it’s not unheard of to see wait times in emergency rooms jump from minutes to hours regularly, which means that there are backlogs taking place throughout a medical facility. Whether due to a resource shortage or not, patients waiting to be seen are becoming increasingly frustrated, and the stress they exhibit takes a toll on the staff trying to help.

Stakeholder Impacts

Building on the idea that employees in a hospital get frustrated in a hurry, any instance of bottlenecks and long wait times can increase everyone’s anxiety, and this isn’t what staff or patients want in a hospital. For the staff, burnout is very real in this high-stakes, high-demand field, and these bottlenecks and associated frustrations can result in delayed treatments as well as lost revenue for a hospital, which in turn means worse care across the board.

One-Off Solutions

To try to mitigate these concerns, hospital administrators try solutions like temporary staff, which only fix long-term issues temporarily. Instead, with Lean Six Sigma, you have a systematic approach to get to the bottom of what is needed to deliver lasting results alongside the need for bigger change. Instead of a one-off solution, data-driven methods will help uncover exactly where the inefficiencies are and tackle them head-on.

How Lean Six Sigma Improves Patient Flow

Reduced Wait Times

Understandably, at the very top of the list for how Lean Six Sigma can be of assistance in healthcare is reduced patient flow. Using Lean strategies, you can utilize tools like Value Stream Mapping to see which steps in the process of checking patients in and discharging them are causing bottlenecks. It’s not uncommon to see how hospitals incorporate these strategies and see drops of more than one-third of the previous wait time completely cut out.

Now, add in Six Sigma precision, and you have statistical analysis on your side to pinpoint the exact weak wait times, and in turn, try to standardize intake processes to better move patients along to help them get seen and discharged faster. This step does require constant monitoring, but the end result is both faster access to care as well as more specific help from staff.

Streamlining Processes

If you incorporate Lean Six Sigma into healthcare, you are going to take away any steps that don’t add value, like filling out documentation twice. This is going to speed up a patient’s journey almost immediately while adding Kaizen events to target quick fixes, like simplifying discharge protocols to free up beds in a hospital faster. Ultimately, it goes without saying that streamlining processes can deliver faster care to everyone.

In addition, you have the incredible consistency that is Six Sigma, which means that standardizing work ensures uniform procedures across the board. This is going to result in fewer errors and the need to rerun tests, which, again, allows patients to be cared for faster and, in turn, frees up beds in a quicker, more efficient way without sacrificing overall care.

Optimizing Resources

Arguably, one of the biggest incentives of adding Lean Six Sigma to a healthcare facility is to optimize existing resources already in place. It’s very unlikely any existing facility has a significant budget just to bring in more staff or more serious process overhauls, so any changes have to be done with current resource levels.

It’s for this reason that things like electronic health records and scheduling software need to be optimized in order to make adjustments in real-time, using data-driven approaches and analytics to help proactively make the right changes to ensure patient flow is moving faster. This is going to require significant cross-department coordination, but the end result is an easy tie back to this whole idea of reducing bottlenecks once and for all.

Better Patient Experiences

At the end of everything with Lean Six Sigma and healthcare, the whole goal is to enhance the patient experience. Any instance in which a patient is seen faster is going to reduce their overall anxiety, which means reduced anxiety for the staff as well. Having clear communication between patients and staff is another way to not just build trust, but it also increases overall patient satisfaction scores, which hospitals use to gauge their overall effectiveness in serving a community.

Better yet, streamlining patient flows will help lower the risk of safety concerns like hospital-acquired infections from long stays. Any instance of standardizing protocols to reduce medication errors can result in safer care, which ties right back to the whole idea of increasing patient satisfaction.

Benefits of Lean Six Sigma in Patient Flow

Overall, there are a lot of beneficial reasons for implementing Lean Six Sigma in patient flow. At the very top of the list, satisfaction scores have typically gone up between 15 and 25% early on in the launch of a project. Add to this that shorter stays equal a lower infection risk, and patients get quicker, safer care.

You also have to consider the operational gains that come along with a rollout, as waste can be reduced by as much as 20% in the initial launch stages. Optimizing staff scheduling can reduce overtime, which reduces the stress on employees. Lower stressloads equal improved support from the staff, which in turn results in at least a 10-15% increase in staff satisfaction scores by patients.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

On the subject of Lean Six Sigma, there is so much more to learn about, including more about precision healthcare and how Lean Six Sigma can save both lives and dollars. Staying on the topic of Lean Six Sigma, you can also look at how this business methodology can help streamline the integration of businesses during mergers and acquisitions.

When you want to move on from the Lean Six Sigma topic, jump into another pressing issue, like how to align cybersecurity initiatives with corporate strategy. This, like healthcare, is a similarly big problem that needs to be addressed before it’s too late. Customer satisfaction, again, like in healthcare, is very much on the line if a company can’t get this right.

Conclusion

Overall, Lean Six Sigma uses data-driven tools and principles to help eliminate bottlenecks, which results in faster and safer care in healthcare facilities. Best of all, the changes here are implemented in a way that is set up to last as long as possible. All the while, Lean Six Sigma also allows for healthcare groups to gain a competitive edge to help show why one hospital is more deserving of patients than another, which in turn results in improved revenue, which leads to improved staff satisfaction.