Thinking Lean in Healthcare

CHICAGO, June 3, 2009—Lean thinking helps healthcare professionals eliminate waste in any activity performed within a facility. It is the efficient use of staff, resources and technology to provide the highest level of service possible to the healthcare customer: the patient, according to a feature article in the June issue of the Journal of AHIMA.

Lean thinking is a technique for creating change, and health information management professionals can take several roles to implement it within organizations. Thinking Lean in Healthcare explains that lean thinking in a healthcare environment involves five steps to improve a selected process: value, the value stream, flow, pull and perfection.

1. Each step in a process should produce value for the customer: patient, physician or administrator. If a process does not add value it must be re-engineered or eliminated.
2. Value stream examines the process or service and helps to identify waste.
3. Flow eliminates batching or queuing to ensure process is worked on continuously until complete.
4. Pull accomplishes the process or service as requested or needed by a step in a value stream.
5. Perfection provides continuous improvement through incremental change based on outcomes.  

 Also discussed are the specific types of waste present within healthcare organizations: information, process and physical environment.

• Information waste can be avoided by working from a single source of information. This may remain a problem until electronic health records become ubiquitous. Other issues include manual checking, reentering data, converting formats, data errors and data safety issues.
• The biggest types of process waste in healthcare are defects which occur when a processor service does not serve the purpose for which it was created. Other types of process waste include rework, workarounds, approvals and waiting.
• The most common physical environment waste is safety. Other types include movement; unclear roles responsibilities, authority, and accountability; and lack of training.

Read the complete article in the June issue of the Journal of AHIMA or online at journal.ahima.org.

About AHIMA

The American Health Information Management Association is America’s leading professional society whose mission is to “improve healthcare by advancing best practices and standards for health information management and [serve as] the trusted source for education, research and professional credentialing.” AHIMA represents more than 53,000 specially educated HIM professionals who serve healthcare and the public by managing, analyzing and utilizing data vital for health system management. www.ahima.org