Principles and Techniques for Sustained Improvement

Thursday June 13th at 1PM Eastern.

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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!

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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.

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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.

Here are some of the consolidated thoughts and ideas that were shared by the participants of the Lean Executive Day workshop on Resolving Conflicting Pressures.

For a more information email us at corp@leanadvisors.com or visit www.leanadvisors.com

Use communication and change management to counter the incorrect impression that lean and budgets appose each other.

- As lean eliminates waste, costs are dramatically reduced

- As lean standardizes processes, managers have freed time to examine other issues and focus on improvement

Ensure that headcount reductions due to loss of business, poor growth, budget cuts, etc. are not equated to process improvement due to lean.

- People will not participate in lean improvements if they fear their jobs will be eliminated.

Educate everyone on the relationships that drive budget success.

- Lean reduces inventories and tied-up capital

- Lean improves quality and reduces rework

- Lean reduces the effort to do the same amount of work – freeing time and capacity.

Ensure that there is a balance of metrics used to measure the organization’s success – not just financial.

- Cost, Quality (including safety), and Time.

- Do not let capital investment in point improvements (for example faster machines or huge IT solutions) take focus over the success of the end-to-end value stream. Use value stream mapping and customer demand to understand success.

Ensure that trends are used to review key metrics rather than month-to-month or point-to-point comparisons.

- Statistical process control charts and histograms are useful in understanding process behavior. A good consulting company can train you on them.

- Remember that value stream improvements require changes – which often need stabilization before full performance is realized. Don’t be too quick to judge!

Involve finance people or accountants in improvements early. If they understand the nature of the changes made, they will be better equipped to understand the success of lean.