We are excited to announce that Mike Boucher (VP, Lean Advisors) and Alain Rabeau (Senior Consultant, Intersol Ltd.) will be presenting at the Innovations in Healthcare Process Improvement: Enhancing the Patient Experience, Achieving Better Results Conference May 5-6, 2015 in Toronto, Ontario.

This session will share current Process Improvement and Change Management best practices for creating a Lean Culture in the Healthcare environment.

Critical Topics will Include:

• Laying the Foundations with Reliable Data
• What Success Can Look Like: Stories from the ‘Front Lines’
• Significant Improvement in Turnaround Times in the Lab
• Tackling ALC Patient Discharge
• The Transformative Power of Lean from Boardroom to Bedside
• Critical Thinking about Process Improvement and Lean: A Tool, a Philosophy or a Journey? (Panel Discussion)
• Adapting Process Improvement and Lean Methodologies to Smaller Hospital Settings
• With the New Era of Accountability, Change is not Coming – It has Already Arrived!
• Leading for Results: The Challenges in Embedding Lean at the Highest Levels to Drive Improvement and Sustainability
• Achieving an Integrated System of Care: Patient/Caregiver Engagement as a Catalyst for Process Improvement and Regional Transformation
• Upstream and Downstream: Delivering 21st Century Healthcare across the Continuum of Care
• Leaning toward New Directions in the U.K.
• Citizens First: Saskatchewan’s Bold Experiment Applying Lean in the Public Sector(remote presentation)
• Networking Luncheon for Delegates and Speakers
• The Excellent Care for All Act in Review: Challenges, Progress and Future Goals
• Advances in Process Improvement: Challenges and Accomplishments in the U.S.
• Networking Refreshment Break
• Connecting the Dots between Process Improvement, Lower Risk Assessments and the Bottom Line
• The Future State: What Does Cost-Effective and Sustainable Patient-Centred Care Look Like and How Can it Best be Achieved?

Mike Boucher has been asked to co-chair the event. He has over 20 years of experience working with professionals teams all over North America to assist them in transforming their processes using Lean to make them more efficient. He has worked in all types of environments and sectors such as government, healthcare, manufacturing, educational institutes and energy. He was a Lean Healthcare Pioneer and introduced Lean thinking and adapted the methodology to Healthcare – he worked with dozens of healthcare organizations some of which are Mayo, Saskatchewan Health Ministry and Regions, Toronto Sick Kids, etc. He understands the effective way to create maximum sustainable change which results in increased pride within the staff while improving quality, service and cost.

His colleague, Alain Rabeau, is presenting a session which is critical to any successful improvement initiative – ‘Navigating Change Management to Build Successful Relationships for Process Improvement’. Alain has over 25 years experience in strategic and operational planning, organizational development, and change management both at the department level and individual level. He has integrated this experience and knowledge with the Lean process improvement methodology and understands the challenges facing teams when trying to create improvements and change within their environments. He will demonstrate why understanding the cultural aspects is as important, and sometimes more important, than the actual technical change itself. His insight is key to success for both your staff and your clients.

More details and registration information coming soon!

Principles and Techniques for Sustained Improvement

Thursday June 13th at 1PM Eastern.

Register Now

Mistake-Proofing (or Poka Yoke) prevents mistakes from being made or makes the mistake obvious at a glance, so that corrective action can be taken before a patient is harmed. It’s a common sense approach tocreate low-cost, effective design changes that reduce errors.

Brian Nass has worked in quality and continuous improvement for over 20 years.  He held several leadership positions at Mayo Clinic in Rochester including Executive Director of Continuous Improvement and COO of Lab Services. Most recently as VP, Performance Improvement at Mission Health System in North Carolina.

Learn techniques for eliminating defects, improving quality and streamlining work.

Brian will discuss mistake-proofing within the specific context of healthcare; however, this webinar is not specific to only the healthcare industry. Many examples and references will come from healthcare, however this webinar will benefit managers from all industries who want to better understand the widespread application of mistake-proofing. Join Us!

Register Today

Online Certification Available for Healthcare Organizations

Lean Advisors Online, is pleased to announce that Quality Healthcare Network (QHN.CA) now endorses their industry leading Online Yellow and Green Belt Certification Courses for Healthcare Organizations worldwide.

Developed in partnership with Healthcare Organizations, the Ministry, and our e-learning partner Automated Learning, the Online Yellow and Green Belt Certification courses are tailored specifically for Healthcare organizations who are looking for a cost effective solution and who desire the flexibility to learn and earn their designation online.

Using their interactive, e-learning courses, an Online Yellow and Green Belt Certification will provide individuals with a valuable credential and knowledge to enrich their contribution within their organizations, to assume greater responsibility and assist with leading Lean business process improvement initiatives and promote effective cultural change.

“The online lean training tool developed by Lean Advisors has been a very effective way to deliver key training in a very efficient manner,” stated Steven Read CFO and VP Corporate Services, Brockville General Hospital. “ It has really enhanced our education offering, and by letting people go through the modules at their own pace it has allowed us to reach more people, more quickly, and with more effective outcomes.”

The Online Yellow and Green Belt Certification Programs are a flexible and cost–effective way to deliver consistent Lean training across your organization, assisting in an initial rollout of Lean Healthcare practices as well as in sustaining and embedding Lean concepts within an organization’s culture for the long term.

About Lean Advisors Inc.

Lean Advisors Inc, a privately owned Canadian corporation founded in 1999, is dedicated to transforming entire organizations with Lean Thinking and Process Improvement.

Lean Advisors provides full service, unique Lean Training, Consulting and Online e-learning Certification Programs to organizations across North America. Our Lean programs and services are delivered through our network of experienced senior Lean Consultants, providing a wealth of knowledge and practical hands-on experience to our diverse customer base. Our Online Certification Programs offer cost effective and flexible solutions to ensure a consistent message and training standard is delivered across organizations. We are committed to helping our clients build high-performance teams that continually innovate to transform their organizations and achieve sustainable results using Lean Principles and Methodology.

For More Information:  www.leanadvisorsonline.com or www.leanadvisors.com.    Media Contact: Bobbi Faulkner: bfaulkner@leanadvisors.com

About Quality Healthcare Network (QHN.CA)

QHN.CA is Canada’s leading independent QI community. Our community of healthcare organizations provides an open forum to share leading-edge ideas and lived experiences to increase the quality of health systems. Together, we turn the best new concepts into improvement practices.
We pride ourselves on our ability to develop relevant and timely programs and resources. For us, it’s crucial to work with professionals from all healthcare sectors because their insights can be adapted and applied in different environments. We collaborate to create scalable solutions for organizations of all sizes.

See how our community gets quality done at www.QHN.CA

About Automated Learning

Automated Learning Corporation® (ALC) is a premier-provider of corporate learning solutions and e-learning products that improve performance in the workplace. ALCs LearnTech® products utilize the best in instructional design, with high levels of interactivity, careful attention to adult-learning principles, and skilled use of multi-media.

ALC specializes in technical process training, serving a global market from

North America to Hong Kong, with clients ranging from large multinational manufacturers to small, single location companies. ALC is committed to providing comprehensive, high quality, effective and easy-to-use learning solutions that deliver improved performance and business value.  ALC has been providing courses in the area of Lean since 2002.

Automated Learning head offices are located in Kanata, Ontario, Canada.

For More Information: www.automatedlearning.com.

Visit www.leanadvisorsonline.com or Call  (877) 778-6413.

Endorsed by:

By identifying how health care organizations and other industries have both succeeded and failed at improving timely access across their organizations and examine how to improve timely access across your organization or the system in which it operates.

Click to learn more about the 2013 conference.

About Taming of the Queue

Since 2004, the annual Taming of the Queue (TQ) conference has brought together a community of interest from across Canada to discuss access and wait time issues. Representing a wide range of perspectives, conference participants assess progress being made on wait-time measurement and management. Sponsored by several national health stakeholders, these events have enhanced knowledge about the issue, while exchanging best practices and helping to shape the public policy agenda.

They are fighting fires while responding to pressures from both the organization above and staff below. Meanwhile, they are being told to cut costs, improve quality and improve service.

With so little hours in a day, where do they find the time?

Join us for our free webinar, “Management Capacity:  Creating Standard Leadership Roles for the Lean Supervisor.”

Mike Boucher, our Vice President of Client Services, will share his insights.

We will show you how to free up management time by understanding executive priorities and analyzing management activities, creating Standard Leadership Roles.

Date: Thursday, January 24th, 2013

Time: 1300 – 1345 EST

Space is limited.  Register Here!

About the Presenter: Mike Boucher, VP Client Services

Mike Boucher has had extensive experience with Lean in his role leading companies in their Continuous Improvement and Lean journey. Over 20 years, he held numerous operational positions with a major distribution and logistics corporation.  Mike has worked with various healthcare organizations and Government and College administrations including the Ministry of Health, Fleming College, Mayo Clinic, Toronto Sick Children’s Hospital, Marietta Memorial Hospital, Luther Midelfort Hospital and others. Lean applications within the healthcare setting include; Surgical Value Streams,Core Labs, Cytogenetics, Micro-Biology, Critical Care Units, Emergency Dept, Pre Surgical Center, Outpatient Clinics, Admissions & Discharge etc.  In the Government and College transformations, he worked on all administrative processes including policy, finance, human resources activities, quality etc.

Consistently, Lean applications in these settings focuses on optimizing service to the clients and improving turnaround times/lead times.  Through this endeavor, Mike has worked with teams to improve flow and truly identify the needs of the client. Unnecessary costs and wasteful activities are eliminated in order to better support staff in their efforts to provide service or value to their clients.

Mike’s greatest asset is his ability to simplify complex production and process issues through the application Lean principles and practice.  Mike is a strong promoter of Value Stream Mapping as one of the most important tools that companies can use to align their organization and promote a customer focused perspective. It is this approach that allows companies to best identify their waste and systematically remove it from their processes and value streams.

Challenge: Not all senior leaders have the vision, understanding and/or have “bought in” to making Lean a priority.

This is one of the critical steps and foundation blocks that must be in place to ensure the success of any Lean Transformation and Organizational Culture Change.

Root Cause: In our brainstorming sessions, the following were identified as some of the possible reasons this occurs.

• Lack of Knowledge/Education about what lean truly is and its benefits.
• Not aligned with Strategic Goals
• No clear metrics or goals associated
• Unclear about the Return on Investment
• Lack of ongoing communication
• Cultural issues internally
• Conflicting priorities
• Control
• Trust
• Resources to support and sustain lean
• Fear of this being just another “flavour of the month”

Each root cause listed above impacts leadership support and each one of those challenges requires an investigation to determine what would need to be in place to most effectively address them.

Possible Solutions:

Some of the possible solutions or ideas that could help to begin to address the challenge of achieving Senior Leadership buy in were as follows:

• Help Senior Leadership understand the value and overall system impact to create the vision
• Learn to speak the language of the Sr Leadership team and what is important to them
• Demonstrate the ROI of Lean through metrics meaningful to Leaders and its Strategic Alignment within the Organization
• Create capacity with staff and allocate resources to support the vision
• Create small wins which tie into the larger picture and work towards winning over naysayers
• Establish Goals and Focused Scope of Project
• Within you sphere of influence, create a pro-active and empowered culture

These are some of the potential solutions that were identified from our session and are worthy of investigation and strategy. Lean Advisors employs senior consultants who are veterans in the industries they serve. To learn more about how we can help you make your organization everything that it can be, contact us.

With the objectives being to reduce stress on staff while meeting higher demands, being more responsive and lowering the cost of care and determining the technological advancements/innovation needed to support the new improved processes well into the future.

The end-to-end process in several areas will be assessed and redesigned in order to improve the flow of information, communication and the patient throughout the ‘system’.

In 2008, the Montfort Hospital emergency room was one of the province’s worst. Its sickest patients waited up to 20 hours to be admitted. Patients complained and nurses quit. Morale was low and turnover was high. The nurses who remained were overworked and burnt out.

Occasionally, staff frustration boiled over; patients either left without being treated, or went public with stories about rude behaviour and substandard care. The hospital became a focus of negative headlines. “It was a crisis,” admits François Lemaire, Montfort’s clinical director of the ER.

These days, Montfort is no longer a laggard among Ontario’s busiest ERs. Its wait time for the sickest patients is 10 hours — half of what it was in 2008 — even though the volume of patients continues to rise. From 35,000 patients in 2008, the ER now treats 52,000 annually. Many of them are sicker and harder to treat than patients in the past. Yet despite these challenges, Montfort’s wait time continues to fall.

A recent survey of Ontario hospitals indicated that nine out of 10 patients would recommend Montfort’s emergency department to their family and friends. And the turnover in ER nurses is so low that there are currently no full-time openings — a dramatic change from 2008 when there were 15 vacant positions.

The turnaround, aided by $3.7 million in provincial funding since 2008, is one example of how Montfort says it has improved patient care by using practices made famous by Toyota. With the hospital-wide introduction of checklists, streamlining, standardization and non-stop brainstorming with front-line staff, Montfort has joined a growing number of acute-care centres in bringing the efficiency of a factory floor to health care.

The approach, known as lean, has long helped the auto and aerospace industries reduce waste and boost value for customers through continuous small improvements. With a cash-strapped government trying to rein in health spending, Ontario hospitals are catching up, spurred by provincial directives to do more with less.

Nowhere is the need for improved efficiency more critical than in emergency rooms, where speedy care is a key component of good care.

Montfort’s transformation began in January 2009, to teach its staff the lean principles. The hospital paid for the lean consultants with some of the $687,000 it received that year for ER improvement.

The money was part of a four-year, $400-million provincial program called Pay For Results. When it was launched in 2008, Montfort was among 23 of Ontario’s poorest-performing ERs to receive the funding, which gets clawed out of their annual budgets if they don’t show improvement.

Hospital staff deconstructed every aspect of how patients moved through the ER, from the time they arrived by ambulance or car until they were discharged. They examined the “flow” of patients — how they were assessed at triage, how they got their lab tests and diagnostic scans, how they were discharged or admitted and how information moved with them at each stage. They attacked the problem in the same way that factory managers studied the parts of an assembly line.

“We were a whole bunch of people with Post-it notes on the floor that showed all the different steps,” recalls Sophie Audet, an ER nurse. “After it was done, everybody looked at each other and started saying, ‘Oh my God. No wonder we’re so tired.’ There were so many steps. When you see it, you actually realize that.”

Audet and her colleagues worked to simplify the journey for patients and reduce unnecessary tasks for staff. To their surprise, the best ideas were not necessarily flashy, or expensive to implement.

Among other things, a daily activity report was introduced that gave every hospital worker — from the chief executive to department heads, physicians, nurses and housekeeping staff — a snapshot of the traffic in and out of Montfort. It listed the number of patients waiting to be admitted and discharged.

For the first time, staff got a bird’s-eye view of where the hospital’s bottlenecks were. They could also see which departments needed extra help to move patients along. “You see the big picture, not just your own little department,” says Audet.

In the ER, a low-tech whiteboard was introduced. It tracked the location and status of every patient and listed what services they were waiting for. For the first time, method and transparency were imposed, allowing the nursing team to manage patients more quickly and effectively. The approach also reduced the chances of patients being lost in the shuffle.

“Before, we used to write down everything by hand,” says Johanne Gougeon, the ER’s lead nurse. “Now, we write on magnets. If we have a patient go somewhere, we just move the magnet around. It’s on the board, it’s written out, it’s all standardized and everybody can see what’s happening.”

In addition, the triage process was simplified for patients with minor complaints. And the workflow of the diagnostic imaging department as well as the work schedules of housekeeping staff were adjusted to conform with the ER’s busiest times of the day.

Other changes related to inconveniences in the physical layout that added up to hours of lost productivity every day.

For example, the storage and labelling of medical supplies were standardized so that nurses did not waste precious time searching for surgical dressings or catheters. A method was introduced to manage wheelchairs, which were never available when staff needed them, leading to longer-than-necessary delays for patients waiting to be moved or discharged.

“We (drew) a line on the floor and we put up a sign: ‘Three wheelchairs here,’ ” says Lise Vaillancourt, director of clinical services. “All of a sudden, when somebody was done with a wheelchair, they knew what to do with it.”

Even a simple procedure like urine analysis often kept patients waiting because the fridge where the samples were stored was far from the nursing station. “We calculated that the nurse had to walk something like 150 steps and another 150 steps back an average of 75 times per day,” says Vaillancourt. “So we just took the fridge and put it under the counter. Now, it’s zero steps.”

Based on these seemingly minor improvements, ER wait times at Montfort fell by 10 per cent within three months.

Meanwhile, other changes happening hospital-wide also helped to ease some of the ER congestion. Physicians and nurses started to emphasize discharge planning almost as soon as patients were admitted. In the past, discharge planning only took place toward the end of a patient’s stay, which often led to extra days spent unnecessarily in the hospital. The resulting bed shortages triggered a backlog of patients waiting in the ER to be admitted.

Another change involved introducing a system of early-warning signs that flagged hospital staff about imminent overcrowding, giving them more lead time to plan for a higher number of patients.

By 2010, two years after Montfort introduced lean, its ER was among three that were recognized as the most improved in the province. That year, the department was awarded a $200,000 bonus under Pay for Results. By then, the ER had left its cramped and aging space for a brand new facility that was double its previous size, part of the hospital’s $300-million expansion of its premises on Montreal Road.

The new space allowed for even more ER efficiencies to be introduced.

These days, when patients walk into the Montfort’s ER, one of the first things they see are signs telling them what the estimated waiting time is. Based on how serious their illnesses or injuries are, they are directed to different waiting areas and treatment zones. They take a number to wait so they know how many patients are ahead of them.

Instead of having nurses or porters accompany the walking wounded to get their diagnostic scans, there are colour-coded lines on the floor that guide patients to where they need to go. In the past, patient care suffered in part because staff spent so much time shuttling patients back and forth.

Hospital officials say patients, especially those with minor complaints, are now so savvy that they’ll call ahead to check Montfort’s wait times against those of The Ottawa Hospital or Queensway Carleton. “Now, people are shopping around,” says Lemaire, the ER director. “This is our reality.”

Excerpt from the Ottawa Citizen
To Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/health/Toyota+style+management+helps+Montfort+wait+times/7427615/story.html