29 Apr Lean Six Sigma for Doctors
With medical practices facing usual business challenges – and lagging 20 years behind other businesses in using Lean Six Sigma to drive profits, there is no better time to adopt Lean Six
Sigma for the Medical Practice and improve profitability by improving processes.
Lean Six Sigma principles, and to 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?
- Prevent medical mistakes.
- Improve patient care.
- Decrease mortality rates.
- Use analytics to identify inconsistent behaviour by payers.
- Use techniques to improve both patient satisfaction and staff morale.
- Eliminate bottlenecks in your practice and use metrics to make smart practice improvement decisions.
2 WHAT IS LEAN SIX SIGMA?
Lean and Six Sigma are two methodologies that focus on continuous improvement in the production of services with the goal to provide more value to each patient.
Six Sigma and Lean are both different concepts. Six Sigma is a formal strategy that targets the reduction of defects in the delivery of services, practices’ practice ‘Lean’ on a smaller scale and works towards eliminating waste in the production of operational support and procedures.
A combination of the two relies heavily on data. Moreover, it works exceptionally well in healthcare administration systems because there is not the need to acquire additional resources to start.
WHAT IS LEAN SIX SIGMA IN HEALTHCARE?
It’s quite easy to implement Lean Six Sigma in medical practice. The system only involves mapping the normal processes and identifying which steps aren’t contributing/adding value and just wasting precious resources.
In the healthcare industry, to evaluate the system for Lean Six Sigma, you must look at all steps of each process. For example, you can to determine how much time it takes to replace used implements with sterilised ones and to check on a patient’s vitals.
The goal is to ask why? Why do we do it that way? Is there a better more efficient way to complete the task? What errors occur? How often do they happen?
WHY IS THE HEALTHCARE SECTOR LATE TO ADOPT LEAN SIX SIGMA?
Whether it’s Lean, Six Sigma or a combination of the two, various professional services have been applying them for quite some time.
However, the healthcare sector has shown a reluctance to adopt such an improvement methodology.
The healthcare sector can’t easily absorb any new administrative methodology because the stakes are too high.
This is due to the busy state of physicians who already have too much work on their plate.
They don’t have time to apply the process of Lean Six Sigma.
Ironically, they are too busy to be productive.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF LEAN SIX SIGMA?
Nonetheless, it would be ignorant to say that things aren’t changing because there are some healthcare providers (hospitals in particular) that have fully embraced Lean Six Sigma and many others are showing an interest in applying Lean Six Sigma to their processes.
The majority of the industry practice managers have yet to realise how effective an improvement strategy can be, for their organisations.
They believe the key to getting more profit is cutting costs (a dangerous game in the medical industry) or increasing revenue.
There is a disconnect – the focus should be on the margin.
Implementing Lean Six Sigma and improving efficiency in the system is far more realistic; it lets medical practices limit the amount of waste of valuable resources (including time) in their processes while improving productivity at the cost of nothing.
HOW CAN LEAN SIX SIGMA IMPROVE MEDICAL PRACTICES?
When doctors and practice managers add Lean Six Sigma to an organisation’s management processes, they can reduce times for visit cycles and also cut waiting times.
Lean Six Sigma reduces non-value-adding activities, leads to increased effectiveness, efficiency and productivity (e.g., enhanced service quality and patient safety, better use of resources).
In short, they can develop new effective processes for patients to check-in faster, more effectively, which increases the number of consultations each hour.