What is Lean in Healthcare?

Healthcare costs are rising too quickly and too many preventable errors occur in most hospitals around the world. We strongly believe the "lean" methodology is our best hope for improving quality while truly reducing waste and excessive costs, thus increasing the value provided by our healthcare systems. Today, a number of leading organizations are demonstrating they can provide better value through proven and tested process improvement methods. These organizations include community hospitals, academic medical centers, primary care clinics, dental practices, and other healthcare settings.

Healthcare professionals often ask how lean, a methodology associated primarily with Toyota and manufacturing industries, can apply in healthcare. Lean is not just a set of tools for improving quality in a factory - it is a set of methods, principles, and philosophies that form a complete management system. Lean can be applied in any setting where work is done, employees face problems, and people lead or manage others, and this includes healthcare. Lean supports the purpose of any healthcare organization - providing the best patient care using the minimum number of resources.

Visit our "Resources" page for articles that highlight real examples of the measurable improvements made by healthcare organizations around the world.

Lean, in any setting, is a customer-focused management philosophy. In healthcare, lean means focusing on the patient as the primary customer. A heightened patient focus means implementing new lean methods for ensuring patient safety and quality of care, such as checklists and error proofing methods. Patient focus also means designing processes and physical spaces with the patient in mind, minimizing wait times and travel distances. Simply put, many lean hospitals describe their goals as follows: "No waste, no waiting, zero harm."

Lean also places a premium on supporting healthcare professionals and staff to maximize their patient care time and activity. Before lean, healthcare workers often spend hours a day dealing with "waste" or problems in the workplace. "Waste" is any activity that does not directly help move forward the patient's diagnosis or treatment. For example, nurses might search for missing pulse oximeters each and every day, facing the same frustrations repeatedly instead of stopping to fix the process, once and for all, so that needed supplies and equipment are always available. Healthcare quality experts estimate that between 30 and 50% of all healthcare work activity can be categorized as "waste." The opportunity with lean is to reduce costs by eliminating waste, not through traditional cost cutting, which often includes providing fewer services or reducing headcount.

Lean focuses on doing more with less. Before lean, healthcare organizations typically believe their problems can only be solved with "more" - more space, more people, and more money. More space costs money, money hospitals are increasingly pressured to avoid spending. More people is often not even an option, cost aside, because of extreme shortages of professionals such as nurses, medical technologists, and pharmacists. Through lean, hospitals learn methods that allow them to increase capacity without adding people - true productivity. And many hospitals have been able to cancel multi-million dollar capital expansion projects as they learn how to use their existing space more effectively with lean principles put in place.

It may seem like wishful thinking, but the application of lean methods in healthcare will bring benefits for all stakeholders -- patients, employees, providers, and hospital.