10 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine
CONNECTING@IISE
Aaron Kanne, CareLogistics, Marietta, Georgia
Success involving non-hospital employed physicians in
past lean/kaizen events?
Have any of you had success in getting non-hospital employed
physicians involved in daylong or multiday lean improvement
events?
We are working in the women’s services department and we
are planning three, one-day lean events where we are plan-
ning to redesign key processes, one per day. One big prob-
lem they are having is crossteam collaboration, specifically
between nursing and physicians. We wanted them to commit
one OBGYN physician per day to participate in the current to
future state design events; however, we were told they couldn’t
commit that kind of time. These are independent groups and
we were told they cannot give up office hours without a very
large lead time. We tried identifying the most crucial times for
their involvement in the day, and we were again turned down.
So, we are barging forward and will attempt to get their input
and buy in afterward, but we are worried since they won’t
have participated.
What have you done in a similar situation to either get physi-
cians involved or get them on board after a similar type of event?
Thank you in advance for your thoughts and ideas.
Todd Schneider, Lean Promotion Office, OhioHealth
RE: Success involving non-hospital employed physi-
cians in past lean/kaizen events?
We’ve had similar difficulties, even with our employed provid-
ers. Admittedly, this is still an area we struggle with. A few ap-
proaches we’ve taken:
1) For one contracted group, our hospital leadership com-
pensated the physician group for their time which enabled the
physician group to free up some resources.
2) In several situations, we’ve highlighted a few times
throughout the day for a physician to check in and provide in-
put. The most successful approach has been to invite the physi-
cian to join us for lunch so they can eat and give us feedback.
The closer to the meeting room is to their daily work, the more
likely they are to pop-in.
3) In a couple instances, we’ve done off-hours kaizen. In one
case, we ran the kaizen from 2-8 p.m. They still had to move
some patients off of their calendars for the last hour or two of the
day, but obviously this took away from their family time.
With all kaizens, we try to emphasize going to engage with
the team as part of the workshop. We’ll structure a few questions
or items to review and send people out to run ideas past certain
folks (validate current state, obtain future state ideas) and come
back and debrief.
Eric Davies, MD, MS, St. Joseph Mercy Oakland,
Pontiac, Michigan
RE: Success involving non-hospital employed physi-
cians in past lean/kaizen events?
Hi Aaron: Pay them! Most physicians in a smaller private prac-
tice cannot afford to spend significant time not generating rev-
enue. You are facing one of the significant hurtles in creating
value in a private practice environment. If you do decide to re-
imburse them for their time, I recommend you make creating
a process for obtaining feedback and building consensus among
all the physicians as part of the terms for payment. Otherwise
you will just get the opinions of the physicians you hire and
resistance from the other physicians because you did not listen
to them. Good luck.
Twitter
Twitter #AppliedErgo2019
Highlights from the Applied Ergonomics Conference held
March 25-28 in New Orleans. More at www.iise.org/AEC/.
May 2019 | ISE Magazine 11
Coupon Tammy @CouponTammy
Replying to @Logitech. My healthy computing tip is have
a good chair! I have an ergonomic chair that helps me use
my core and lets me move around. I don’t end up so tight at
the end of the day.
Monica Matlis @mvmatlis
Dr. William Marras, keynote at 2019 AEC, Ohio State, 100
Billion dollars spent on Back Injuries. Most disabling injury
in mankind around the world.
Dr. Donald Peterson, Northern Illinois University, discusses
use of exoskeletons as part of the 4th Industrial Revolution
(Industry 4.0) - Cyber Physical Systems (IoT) at the @ap-
pliedergoconf #AppliedErgo2019 during his Aspire talk.
Dr. SangHyun Lee, Ph.D., University of Michigan, discusses
AI at @appliedergoconf Aspire talk. For the past decade, Dr.
Lee has been working on Smartphone-based Motion based
capture for risk assessment.
Correction
The story on the Savannah, Georgia, port expansion in the
March 2019 edition included two numerical errors. The “by
the numbers” listing on page 35 should read that total car-
go at the port increased by 2.6 million tons. On page 37 in
“Bigger ships mean more cargo,” New Panamax ship data
should read it has a 49.9-foot draft.
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