But take a look anyway, if you have an interest in process improvement in hospitals. This is a collection of my best posts on this topic.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Wow, they work hard!

The roll-out of Lean at BIDMC continues throughout the hospital. A current project is to redesign the work flow on "CC6," one of our busiest medical/surgical floors. Although the staff has been working on this for several months, it can be difficult to find time during the workday to make improvements when nurses, patient care technicians, and others have full patient assignments. So, this week, we have taken two days aside for an improvement event, during which the staff will have dedicated time to look at their processes and experiment with improvements.

I dropped by for a short time today to watch people outline the "current state" of their work flow. A person in each job category prepared a step-by-step itemization of their daily routine. I offer a videotape of sections of this below. In order, you will see Stacey Adamson, physical therapist; Dawn Castro, resource nurse; Mike Crowley, unit assistant; and Laurie Phillips, case manager. You will also briefly see Jenine Davignon, a management engineer from our Business Transformation office, and Allison Wang, a college co-op student in that office. And finally Oscar Juarez and Sandra Espinosa, being reminded to post lunch breaks as part of a busy day in the work flow of a patient care technician.

I was impressed by the complexity of each person's job. I also began to see, as they presented their daily work, opportunities for reducing waste and improving the work environment and patient care. The team will undoubtedly find many more of those opportunities during this two-day session. If I can drop by tomorrow, I will report back to you.

If you cannot see the video, click here.

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