Welcome to Lean Hospital Devices.
Our vision is to provide a forum for sharing the best ideas from Lean Six Sigma practioners within Healthcare. I have been consulting in Healthcare for a little over 8 years. One of the obstacles I have found to successful Lean implementation in Healthcare has been that there are not enough individuals who know how to create the simple little devices, tools and techniques that makes sustainment of Lean possible. This problem doesn't impact industry quite so much as industrial organizations tend to have more engineers, maintenance people and gadget designers who brainstorm, pilot and build Lean enabling devices.
Consider SMED devices. If you were to go into any decent bookstore (Such as Powell's in the Pacific Northwest) you would find several shelves dedicated to SMED applications in industrial environments. For SMED applications in healthcare, I challenge you to find a single book on that topic with ideas, designs, sketches for healthcare applications even though the need for rapid changeover has been a desired Lean application for Labs and Hospitals for at least the past decade.
To help remedy that scarcity this forum will not concern itself, except tangentially, with broader Lean principles nor Lean Leadership. There are plenty of awesome sites, books, and consultants focused on those two areas.
We will focus on bringing together Lean practioners and experts who are building the Lean devices that must be created by the frontline staff for them to realize the ability to eliminate the waste from discreet value stream steps and achieve what is promised within the context of the broader Lean principle training. Ultimately I can know how to identify waste but if I don't know how to design it out and make sure it stays that way -- I can quickly lose heart that Lean can be applied in my workarea.
This forum will be dedicated to providing those specific examples. It is my hope that these will then allow ideas to be sparked for frontline healthare staff in Labs, Clinics and Hospital departments struggling to eliminate the 7 Wastes of Lean (for purists the Toyota Production System).
Here's to helping Healthcare continue the Journey,
Dave Scottow
