The other day I was having a conversation at the Pittsburgh airport with a man that was carrying a copy of my book Epiphanized. He had so many questions for me and I was worried that I would miss my flight back to Georgia. I must admit that most of the questions were quite good […]

The Emergency Department improvement team began developing their current state process map and found out very early on that imagining their process and getting it down on paper was not an easy task.  There were disagreements for sure on how the actual process looks, but the most difficult thing was deciding how to map out […]

What is my role as the Lean Six Sigma Project Champion? The Champion for your organization will be utilizing key resources to fulfill the project requirements and will need to ensure that each project is an organizational priority and that it has leadership support at the executive level. Champions must have an understanding of the […]

Many people who have gone through a TOC Jonah training session have come away overwhelmed and sometimes feeling like they are unable to apply what they’ve learned.  Let’s face it, the TOC Thinking Process tools are just not easy for some people to grasp and apply, so they kind of put them on the back-burner […]

Do you believe your organization has too many performance measures or too few? Having good data available enables better decisions to be made, but not when the expense of collecting all the data is so high that it severely limits your resources to fix problems and improve quality. This results in a lot of measuring, […]

For those of us engaged in performance improvement initiatives there seems to be a constant bombardment of “things” that seem get in the way of what we’re trying to accomplish.  Things that interfere with our attempts to achieve a goal or objective in our quest to make things better.  Some of these things come out […]

Implementing a focused and structured program for healthcare performance improvement is a huge step that requires a great deal of thought and numerous decisions. One of the most difficult decisions seems to be whether or not to dedicate full time resources as practitioners. In the resource constrained environment that most healthcare organizations operate in, there […]

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of our recently published book, Performance Improvement for Healthcare: Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management Many hospitals have deployed Lean and/or Six Sigma successfully. As their Lean Six Sigma deployments reach maturity, they have the opportunity to take their performance improvements to new heights by […]

Constraints Management A Force Multiplier for Healthcare Performance Improvement Join this dynamic webinar by registering here. When a hospital is presented with major regulatory changes that can impact revenues and margins, a robust performance improvement program must be part of the solution. However, not all programs are created equal. Take a look at an example […]

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of our recently published book, Performance Improvement for Healthcare: Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management “In healthcare quality improvement, systems and processes are not synonymous, but they are interrelated. Within the scope of a process, there can be defined a system of interrelated components and […]