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Improvement Insights Blog
Posts tagged "Healthcare"
Nobody wants to look bad, which can make it impossible to make improvements. Here’s why:
“One of the things I’ve learned in all these years working in Quality Improvement is nobody, but nobody, wants to look bad. With the recent coronavirus [outbreak], the doctor who found that and [leaked news] out to the world, the Chinese government tried to shut him down, tried to keep that bit of information inside because they didn’t want to look bad.
“Well, this isn’t just a Chinese or Asian thing – saving face. In any business you walk into, somebody is in charge of how things are working and they’re in charge of trying to make it better, faster, cheaper.
Continue Reading "Nobody Wants to Look Bad"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Agile Lean Six Sigma, Healthcare, Improvement Insights, Lean, Six Sigma.
Webinar 1 of 3: February 12, 2020
More than 60 people signed up for this webinar, with Jay Arthur doing an overview on the IHI’s goal, and how implementing Agile Lean Six Sigma can speed an organization’s improvement process and better sustain results.
Continue Reading "IHI Trillion Dollar Checkbook Webinar, 1 of 3"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Agile Lean Six Sigma, Data Mining, Healthcare, Webinar.
A couple of years ago, in spite of vaccinations, I got the flu and it turned into pneumonia. Here’s what I do to prevent infections.
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur. A couple years ago, in spite of my flu vaccine and my pneumonia vaccine, I first got the flu, and then that developed into pneumonia, and then I had to spend five days in the hospital… that was not fun, all right? After that I thought, “Hmmm, maybe I should change how I do things, right? How can I keep these things that get near my nose and my mouth away from me?
Continue Reading "Mistakeproofing Flu Season"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Healthcare, Improvement Insights, Lean.
IHI set a goal to reduce healthcare waste by 50% by 2025. Here’s how to do it with the Trillion Dollar Prescription.
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals.” We were just out at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement conference in Orlando, Florida. [There were] like, 4500 medical doctors and nurses and CNO’s and CNMO’s and people all involved in improving healthcare quality. This is their 31st annual conference. (I can tell you based on what I was looking at on the posters, people are not really aggressively going after change…)
“The IHI announced that it’s tackling what they call the “Trillion-Dollar Checkbook.”
Continue Reading "IHI’s Trillion Dollar Aim – Reduce Healthcare Waste by 50% by 2025"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Agile Lean Six Sigma, Healthcare, Improvement Insights.
Some people think they have to climb Mount Everest or do a fire walk to overcome their fears. Maybe it’s just as easy to do the thing you are afraid to do in your normal life. Maybe it’s time to climb Mount Quality. Maybe it’s time to create a hassle-free experience for your company’s customers.
“My wife’s been watching these shows about people climbing Mount Everest. You see people, they’re waiting for the final the final [ascent] and there’s a huge queue of people waiting to go up to the top of Mount Everest… (It’s like [maybe] they should put in an express lane or something!)
Continue Reading "Climbing Mount Quality"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Healthcare, Improvement Insights, Lean, Six Sigma.
A recent report from NAHQ (National Association of Healthcare Quality) found that three-quarters of hospitals had a quality department. But to achieve hassle-free healthcare and zero harm, it will take more than a department to achieve the results desired.
“The National Association for Healthcare Quality just released a report on Quality professionals in health care, and it turns out that in a lot of the situations, about three-quarters of the people responding reported that in their hospital or wherever, that Quality was a department, and in about a quarter [of the responses] Quality was individuals working on stuff.
“Let me be clear about this: Quality is not a department.
Continue Reading "Quality Is Not a Department"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Healthcare, Improvement Insights.
Several attendees told me they had ripped out their line charts and started using Control Charts for their KPIs. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals” and the QI Macros [software].
“We were out at the National Association for Healthcare Quality conference; I was speaking and we were exhibiting there. After I spoke, I had a couple people come up to me who said they’d seen me at the previous year’s convention talking about how to improve things and how line [charts] and bar charts can be harming patients and they said, “You know, I went back to my hospital and we ripped out all of our line charts and we put in control charts for all of our key process indicators.
Continue Reading "Control Charts for KPIs"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Agile Lean Six Sigma, Healthcare, Improvement Insights, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
21st Century Quality is changing how companies implement Lean Six Sigma. Here’s how:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and the QI Macros [software].
“Over the last couple of years I’ve been going all of the Quality conferences, and I’ve seen some presentations that I think point us in a useful direction in terms of how to go about implementing Quality and getting results more quickly, and to accelerate, to develop some exponential growth in terms of how we achieve these results.
“About a year and a half ago I was at the Lean Six Sigma conference in Phoenix , and I saw Christus Health, and they talked about how they started out trying to do the traditional “Big Sigma Black Belt / Green Belt” whole thing, but they weren’t getting any results.
Continue Reading "Agile Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt Training for Results"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Agile Lean Six Sigma, Improvement Insights, Lean, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety (Feb 2018) has an article entitled “Temporal Trends in Fall Rates with the Implementation of a Multifaceted Fall Prevention Program.” Ouch!
I believe the story could have been told easily with quality improvement tools, so here’s how I’d go about it. First, there are a number of tables (i.e., spreadsheets of performance data) like the one below.
The first year, 2003, had only 200 falls because they started measuring in July. The first full year of measurement was 2004.
It would be easy to turn these into control charts, but the authors chose a boxplot with a trend line of predicted falls.
Continue Reading "Reducing Patient Falls – A Case Study"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Healthcare, Jay Arthur Blog, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
I have been thinking for some time that someone would come along, start buying up hospitals and forcing them to adopt the Lean principles of Amazon and Six Sigma to achieve the “science and evidence” that Don Berwick has been challenging the IHI to adopt.
Warren Buffet has the money, but usually invests in “well-run” companies, not ones in trouble. An estimated half of all hospitals are in financial trouble (often because of the lack of Lean Six Sigma).
Bezos and Amazon have the operational efficiency needed in virtually all healthcare environments.
Dimon has a big bank.
They are all worried about the quality of healthcare and the rising costs.
Continue Reading "Hospital Costs a “Hungry Tapeworm on U.S. Economy” says Warren Buffett"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Healthcare, Lean, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
