The Lean Doctors Workbook


Book Description

The content of this workbook is based on the book Lean Doctors: A Bold and Practical Guide to Transforming Healthcare Systems, One Doctor at a Time, and on the authors’ years of transforming care delivery systems with lean. The Six Success Steps discussed in the book are presented here with a focus on implementing them to achieve dramatic and sustainable change. The Success Steps are building blocks; the order in which you apply them matters. They are presented here in an order that has worked in the real world; working through them logically will help you on the path to successful implementation. Each Success Step includes a practical explanation of the theory and maps that illustrate how that particular step impacts the care process in the context of a detailed case study. The authors use several Lean mapping tools, including lean process maps, spaghetti diagrams, and swim lane diagrams. In addition to illustrating lean concepts and their application in the context of a case study discussed throughout the book, these maps provide instructive examples that can help you create similar maps for the processes you operate. With its interactive format and step-by-step design, this workbook is ideal for use in the classroom to teach Lean principles, or with a lean project team to guide a clinical implementation. Together with Lean Doctors, this workbook will help the student of lean or the lean project team learn and apply a complete lean system in a healthcare setting.




Lean Doctors


Book Description

This practical, how-to book clearly and succinctly takes the reader through six proven "success steps" for implementing lean in any healthcare environment: 1. Create physician flow 2. Support physician value-added time 3. Visually communicate patient status 4. Standardize everyone's work 5. Lay out the clinic for minimal motion 6. Change the care delivery model Why go through such a transformation? Because it works. Tell a doctor that he can see the same number of patients, offering the same high quality and personal care, and have an extra 90 minutes at the end of his clinic day -- and that means something. Tell the staff that they can look forward to actually ending on time, with satisfied patients, no backlog, and having focused their attention completely on quality patient care -- and they will listen. These Lean principles and success steps work in clinics ranging from orthopedics to neurology to cardiac care -- the specialty doesn't matter. They work in small practices and large hospital settings. Lean methodology provides the tools to address the frustrations patients and doctors alike experience in the clinic process. Included throughout the book is a case study showing the lean transformation undertaken at the Orthopedic Center at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, with numerous quotes and insights from those actually involved. This transformation resulted in patient wait times being reduced by more than 70 percent, the clinic being able to see 25 percent more patients in less space, patient satisfaction scores sometimes reaching 100 percent, and staff satisfaction scores improving by more than 25 percent.




Lean Six Sigma for the Medical Practice


Book Description

To help medical practices increase profitability without cutting costs or boosting revenues, Greenbranch Publishing announces a new book by Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt Frank Cohen and Practice Management Expert Owen Dahl: Mastering Lean Six Sigma for the Medical Practice - Improving Profitability by Improving Processes. For the first time, this new book translates Lean Six Sigma principles and tools specifically for the real-world medical practice environment. Drawing on his involvement with over 2,000 medical practices, author and Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt Frank Cohen empowers practices - and their advisors - to use 24 process improvement tools to boost efficiency so more of the revenues that come in go directly to the bottom line. What types of improvements can practices make? Learn how to use analytics to identify inconsistent behavior by payers - so practices can hold payers' feet to the fire. See how process improvement can help practices reduce denials by upwards of 50%. Use these techniques to improve both patient satisfaction and staff morale. Learn how to eliminate bottlenecks in your practice and use metrics to make smart practice improvement decisions. Over the past 20 years, Lean and Six Sigma approaches have created profit breakthroughs for other types of businesses. Cohen and Dahl bring this methodology to health care providers, whittling down the myriad of traditional Lean Six Sigma tools to only those that matter most to their practices. Add Lean Six Sigma for the Medical Practice to your "must-read-now" bookshelf and take the first steps toward improving everything from patient visit cycle time to, A/R to staff and patient satisfaction and morale to compliance.




Basics of Health Care Performance Improvement


Book Description

Basics of Health Care Performance Improvement: A Lean Six Sigma Approach prepares future healthcare administrators to meet the challenges of a changing marketplace through the proven Lean Six Sigma method of quality improvement—straightforward principles and procedures that enhance how healthcare organizations operate. With an eye toward meeting consumers’ increasing demand for value in health care, this new volume provides in-depth information on planning and implementing a “Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control” (DMAIC) initiative to reduce errors and improve performance in healthcare settings, and serves as an essential reference on the basics of Lean Six Sigma and its application in augmenting the quality of care. Key Features: Lean Six Sigma case studies drawn from the industry; A thorough exploration of DMAIC approach to quality improvement; Discussion questions in every chapter Instructor Resources: Instructor's Manual, PowerPoint Presentations, and a TestBank




The Lean Management Systems Handbook


Book Description

Performance management, the primary focus of a Lean organization, occurs through continuous improvement programs that focus on education, belief systems development, and effective change management. Presenting a first-of-its-kind approach, The Lean Management Systems Handbook details the critical components required for sustainable Lean management.




Discover Your Optimal Health


Book Description

What is optimal health? As one of the nation's foremost physicians in nutritional intervention, Dr. Wayne Scott Andersen has devoted his career to creating optimal health through a comprehensive approach that addresses and breaks through logistical and psychological barriers. Widely and affectionately known for his work in the field of health coaching as "Dr. A," in Discover Your Optimal Health, he provides an inegrative approach that begins with developing (and maintaining) healthy habits each day. This crucial approach makes health the centerpiece of your life instead of something you do when you discover you have an illness or imbalance. Dr. A reveals how a little attention and discipline now can avoid health crises down the road. No matter what your current health status, you can be as healthy as possible. The habits you develop now make the difference between surviving and thriving, life or death. The steps toward reaching and maintaining your optimal health include: Integrating the Habits of Health into Your Life Discovering the Habits of Healthy Weight Loss Using the Habits of Healthy Eating Understanding the Habits of Healthy Motion Practicing the Habits of Healthy Sleep Employing the Habits of a Healthy Mind




Prime-Time Health


Book Description

Twelve years ago, renowned physician and author Dr. William Sears was diagnosed with cancer. He, like so many people, wanted -- and needed -- to take control of his health. Dr. Sears created a comprehensive, science based, head-to-toe program for living a long, fit life -- and it worked. Now at the peak of health, Dr. Sears shares his program in Prime-Time Health. This engaging and deeply informative book will motivate readers to make crucial behavior and lifestyle changes. Dr. Sears explores how to keep each body system healthy and delay those usual age-related changes. Written in Dr. Sears's wise, accessible, and entertaining voice, Prime-Time Health is a practical program to help you live your best life possible-pain-free, disease-free, stress-free, and medication-free.




How Doctors Think


Book Description

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can—with our help—avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses. How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country’s best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.




Beyond Heroes


Book Description

Hospitals have long relied on the heroics of one brilliant nurse or doctor to save the day. Such heroics often result in temporary workarounds and quick fixes that leave not only patients and quality care at risk, but also increase costs. This is the story of an organization breaking that habit. Like a growing number of healthcare organizations around the world, ThedaCare, Inc. has been using lean thinking and the principles of the Toyota Production System to improve quality of care, reduce waste, and become more reliable. But lean thinking was incompatible with ThedaCare’s old top-down, hero-based system of management. Kim Barnas, former SVP of ThedaCare, shows us how she and her team created a management system that is stable and lean, to spur continuous improvement. Beyond Heroes shows the reader, step by step, how ThedaCare teams developed the system, using the stories of its doctors, nurses and administrators to illustrate. The book explores each of the eight essential components of the lean system, from front-line problem solving with the scientific method to daily team huddles and creating standard work for leaders all the way to the top of an organization. Finally, the author introduces four executives from healthcare systems across North America who have implemented ThedaCare’s system and share the lessons they learned along the way. Beyond Heroes is not just a call to action or an argument for a better healthcare system. It is a necessary roadmap through the rocky terrain ahead, one that healthcare leaders can customize to their special needs.




Doctors


Book Description

From the author of How We Die, the extraordinary story of the development of modern medicine, told through the lives of the physician-scientists who paved the way. How does medical science advance? Popular historians would have us believe that a few heroic individuals, possessing superhuman talents, lead an unselfish quest to better the human condition. But as renowned Yale surgeon and medical historian Sherwin B. Nuland shows in this brilliant collection of linked life portraits, the theory bears little resemblance to the truth. Through the centuries, the men and women who have shaped the world of medicine have been not only very human, but also very much the products of their own times and places. Presenting compelling studies of great medical innovators and pioneers, Doctors gives us a fascinating history of modern medicine. Ranging from the legendary Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, to Andreas Vesalius, whose Renaissance masterwork on anatomy offered invaluable new insight into the human body, to Helen Taussig, founder of pediatric cardiology and co-inventor of the original "blue baby" operation, here is a volume filled with the spirit of ideas and the thrill of discovery.