The institute for Healthcare Improvement believes that LEAN principles can be and are already successfully applied to the delivery of health care.
The three building blocks of a Lean program are: Value Stream & Eliminate Waste, Lean Service Cell, and Daily Improvement. Decatur County Memorial Hospital has partnered with Purdue Healthcare Advisors for the Lean Healthcare Transformation Initiative for all Indiana Critical Access Hospitals and Rural Hospitals.
A conference was held in Aug. 2017 to educate participants with a combination of classroom core training, remote coaching, project work and overall hospital participation. This past year, Purdue Healthcare Advisors’ lean experts helped hospitals’ lean teams begin to incorporate a systematic approach to improvement through the use of Value Stream Analysis (VSA). This term refers to a lean-management method for analyzing the current state and designing a future state for the series of events that take a product or service from its beginning through to the customer.
Through our analysis, DCMH found that through the VSA, it allowed employees to better understand the difference between the hospital preferences/practices and those of the two medical practices. Why is this important to this community? Team members were able to collaborate to define projects and opportunities to help improve the patient experience and workflow.
One DCMH Lean Team Member commented, “The tools available to visually see the process from the time our patients’ calls for an appointment to the time the bill is sent, and to measure the outputs, has been incredible.”
DCMH is constantly striving to make the patient experience more efficient from start to finish. At the conference, our team shared how we were able to decrease time from making appointments to being seen, decrease invoice prep and documentation time, and increase ease of access patient experience scores.
“We wanted to increase the percentage of patients scheduled with an appropriate appointment time. We found our baseline was 93 percent. We were able to increase the accuracy of scheduled appointments from 93 percent to 97 percent,” LEAN team member added.
The DCHM Lean Team members are currently wrapping up year two of the third year program grant. We realize our role as Lean Practitioners is to provide expertise on the lean process improvement tools as facilitators. Our next steps are to continue the Value Stream Analysis and continue focusing on overall patient experience. During year three of the grant, DCMH will continue to look for opportunities to improve our exceptional patient care.