Below is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of our recently published book, Performance Improvement for Healthcare: Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management In today’s competitive and highly volatile economic environment, change is the rule while the steady-state is momentary and uncertain. Change management must be embedded in the technical transformation that is [...]

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of our recently published book, Performance Improvement for Healthcare: Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management A Process-level VSA, or ProcessVSA, is an approach to analyzing a process to identify and eliminate non-value adding activities as well as to develop procedures to manage bottlenecks effectively and [...]

In previous issues of this series, we have explored the importance of linking healthcare process improvement endeavors with organizational strategy, obtaining leadership buy-in, decision-making based on data and analysis, and the appropriate scoping of projects and events. Even with all those things in place, there is one common mistake that can cause a deployment to [...]

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of our recently published book, Performance Improvement for Healthcare: Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management Performance-improvement practitioners apply various performance-improvement tools and techniques to close or mitigate performance gaps throughout an organization. All practitioners are change agents-evangelists for quality and business results-whose passion for excellence [...]

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of our recently published book, Performance Improvement for Healthcare: Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management The assess phase is the most crucial phase in healthcare performance-improvement deployments. And yet it is the one that receives the least attention in many such deployments. The work done [...]

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 [...]

I’m not sure exactly how many Wonka Bars that Veruca Salt’s army of workers opened up to find her golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but she certainly had many more opportunities than Charlie, whose family only had enough extra money to spare for one just one shot at his dream. When it comes [...]

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 [...]