Earlier this month lean healthcare practitioners from all over the country (and the globe) joined each other for the 6th annual Lean Healthcare Summit in Dallas, Texas. On the heels of this event, we’ve gathered three leadership stories from the lean healthcare community of practice below.
- Leadership Q&A: Lisa Yerian, MD, Medical Director of Continuous Improvement, Cleveland Clinic Foundation by David Drickhamer
On what motivated Dr. Yerian to take up lean practice:
“When I first heard about Lean I was immediately intrigued by its power and simplicity. I come from a blue-collar background. Respect for the worker resonates deeply with me. As an optimist I always see room for improvement, and I love the collaborative nature of the [continuous improvement] work. Once I began to do Lean and see people become transformed by the realization of what they could do, I was hooked…
I grew up in rural southeastern Ohio. Many families, including my own, didn’t always have healthcare. That always seemed so wrong. Close friends and family members of mine have suffered from poor quality healthcare or no access to healthcare. I see Lean as the only way to address these problems and really begin to provide high quality, safe, affordable and compassionate care to all people, everywhere.”
Read the full interview. Read the full Cleveland Clinic case study.
- A Better Emergency Department by Dr. Paul Jarvis for Planet Lean
Dr. Paul Jarvis, Consultant in Emergency Medicine, shares a powerful story of his connection to lean thinking in Emergency Medicine:
“My personal lean journey started when one of our senior nurses broke down in tears in my office.
Emergency Department (ED) nurses are a formidable breed: it is not uncommon for them to stay long after their shift has finished just to make sure their patients get the right care. In my experience, they don’t even mind being busy. In fact, they thrive on it. What breaks them, however, is when they are so overloaded they cannot deliver the quality of care they know their patients should receive. This is what happened to our senior nurse, who was so overburdened that she felt patients were suffering.” Read more.
- Jim Womack’s “Top 10” Recommendations for Healthcare and Lean by Mike Stoecklein
Mike Stoecklein, Director of Network Operations at the Thedacare Center for Healthcare Value, shares his top 10 take-aways from Jim Womack’s closing keynote at the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit in Dallas, Texas. “The authority in Lean is in your experimental findings,” Womack says, and when it comes to doing Lean, adaptation is sometimes necessary – “one size doesn’t fit all.”
Read more of Womack’s recommendations for effective leadership in a healthcare setting (or any setting).
