Lean health care hands-on simulation workshop to improve performance and quality

Session
Emergency services

Authors
Matt Morrissette
President
More Effective Consulting, LLC.

Karen Reed
Director of Quality Management
Southern NH Medical Center

Description
This lean health care workshop shows how powerfully a hands-on training exercise demonstrates employee empowerment and improvement techniques. Participants will learn lean health care tools and techniques, design a lean emergency department, and collaborate in a mini kaizen event solving problems and applying ideas in a hospital environment.

Abstract
The goal of training professionals is to help them retain knowledge and attain a sense of empowerment. The most effective way to accomplish this is using hands-on techniques. There are over 20 simulation exercises devoted to lean manufacturing, but none are customized for a hospital service application, except this one being demonstrated.

More than a dozen hospitals and service organizations of varying sizes have used and helped refine this workshop's take-aways. The workshop uses the ED as the environment to learn from and simplifies its complicated dynamics. Tools and concepts that will be demonstrated are line balancing, variability reduction, work standardization and simplification, cycle time vs. takt time, poka-yoking (mistake-proofing) problems, Conducting a kaizen (rapid improvement) event and Little's Law (queue theory). Karen Reed from Southern NH Medical Center will help demonstrate her case study of results achieved using lean health care tools.