Implementing Lean Healthcare: A Guide to Improved Practice Management

Embracing lean management in your organization can deliver multiple benefits. This management philosophy reduces waste in places ranging from serving customers to the manufacturing line and works for almost any business, including service-based businesses like healthcare. At Weave, we have many tools made to implement and improve your lean healthcare options.

Understanding Lean Healthcare

You’re implementing lean principles when you reduce waste, streamline processes, and, ultimately, create value. Perhaps you do these things already to some extent, but by putting them at the forefront of your practice, you’ll see even greater positive changes take shape across the board.

What Is Lean Healthcare?

Lean healthcare refers to a method that looks to create value in a medical practice by eliminating waste and making processes run as smoothly as possible. Key aspects of implementing lean philosophies in healthcare include the following:

• Always seeking improvement
• Identifying activities in the medical office that don’t add value
• Creating value from the patient’s perspective
• Optimizing workflows
• Taking steps to reduce errors
• Reducing wait time per patient
• Reducing costs

A key aspect of implementing lean management in your healthcare facility is being willing to make corrections. Companies that can’t or won’t take an honest look at their work will not succeed in improving it using the lean methodology.

Importance of Lean Healthcare

Among the biggest benefits of using this strategy is the ability to improve patient care. By eliminating time-wasting activities, you can devote more energy and resources to care when running at peak efficiency. Patients notice when your staff spends time with them to go over things like test results in greater detail, which makes them feel acknowledged and keeps them coming back.

Core Principles of Lean Healthcare

Implementing this philosophy in your medical facility requires following a few core principles.

Continuous Improvement

Focusing on continuous improvement and quality empowers your employees to look for ways to deliver better quality and safety constantly. These ideas become part of the workplace’s daily culture. Incremental development and improvement are often a part of this process. Regular procedure reviews and looking for better options are also important for improvement.

Value Creation

Creating value through this process involves focusing on tasks your patients are willing to pay for because they see importance in them. Value creation also involves reducing steps that take time and energy away from your value-creating tasks. One method for value creation is streamlining the process of seeing patients by reducing unnecessary steps.

Unity of Purpose

When going lean at your medical office, you need all employees and managers on board. If one of your primary goals is to improve patient care, all your employees must be focused like a laser on achieving it.

Respect for People

Implementing lean techniques allows frontline workers to make key changes to implement processes and reduce waste. As managers provide ongoing support and coaching points, frontline workers feel empowered and trusted when using lean management, which aids retention.

Visual Management

Identifying problems becomes easier with data-driven tools in place. Visual dashboards, for example, help identify areas with issues. With visual tools for data available, employees have a common factual starting point when discussing solving issues.

Root Cause Problem Solving

Once employees identify problems, they can use process improvement protocols like Lean Six Sigma to work together to find the root cause. Providing employees with data helps them spot inefficiencies and more efficiently get to the heart of any given issue.

Eliminating Waste in Healthcare

In medical practices, eliminating waste is far more complex than encouraging employees to use fewer medical supplies. 

Types of Waste

Using a Six Sigma lean management system helps spot waste in several areas.

Defects and Mistakes

If employees regularly make mistakes, dealing with the resulting issues costs your clinic time and money. Addressing the root cause of mistakes is key to improving efficiency.

Waiting

Patient satisfaction levels decrease when patients and providers wait too long for answers to questions or services. Such delays also waste time and resources.

Transportation

Apply lean management principles to study how your practice stores and accesses patient supplies. Look for ways to make the process faster and more efficient. You may also prevent injuries by studying how to move each patient more efficiently.

Overproduction

Cutting out unnecessary tasks and procedures that waste time and resources provides significant benefits.

Over-processing

Avoid adding complexity to your system. Look for steps and pain points in your processes that don’t add value, such as costly training and unnecessary overtime work.

Inventory

Carrying too much inventory is another common issue in healthcare that can be fixed by going lean. Limit excess supplies and identify waste to reduce costs.

Motion

Look for ways to give staff the most efficient means of moving through the facility to save time.

Human Potential

If you’re not utilizing all the skills each employee has, you’re wasting human resources and potential.

Implement Lean Healthcare Practices

You should deploy several key steps when implementing this philosophy in healthcare organizations.

Aligning Leaders and Staff

Align expectations for your managers and staff members regarding the implementation of lean. Each staff member should have a shared vision about achieving goals while understanding their roles in reaching them.

Empowering Frontline Staff

You don’t want to simply announce that you’re using Lean Six Sigma and tell staff members to go to work. Training is vital to giving your employees the knowledge they need to implement a lean approach. Frontline staff members should be able to make suggestions about training time and other aspects of setting up the training processes.

Promoting a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Implementing a lean methodology at a medical clinic is not a one-and-done process. Employees and managers should be looking for ways to deliver constant improvement. Encourage all staff members to provide feedback about the lean processes without fear of repercussion.

Finding Root Causes

Another aspect of improving outcomes is constantly analyzing patient results and process flow. After discovering inefficiencies through analysis, work to find the root cause of the issue rather than trying to gloss over it. You need to understand why an error occurred and take steps to ensure it doesn’t repeat.

Flexibility and Willingness To Change

No healthcare organization that embraces a lean strategy can exclude new ideas. Encourage all staff members to think creatively about new ways to solve problems, lower costs, and add value. A visible and committed leadership team will fully consider all ideas.

Benefits of Lean Healthcare

You should gain a few key benefits when implementing a lean approach in healthcare system facilities.

Improved Patient Outcomes

By using this philosophy at primary care clinics, you should immediately notice improved patient safety outcomes. When your new processes reduce errors and inefficiencies, healthcare patients receive a far better result in less time. 

Enhanced Operational Efficiency

Improving the efficiency of a lean organization’s entire team delivers long-term benefits. When employees can do their work more efficiently, it frees time and resources to focus on personalization and building relationships in patient care. 

Increased Staff Engagement

Frontline staff members may initially resist some of the changes related to using these processes. However, when they realize you are empowering them to contribute to new solutions for the efficiency of the healthcare clinic and their jobs, you’ll almost certainly see a higher level of engagement and a shared vision. Such benefits often lead to less turnover and burnout, improving staff satisfaction. Healthcare staff empowerment motivates them to serve each patient better, too.

Weave’s Solutions for Lean Healthcare

When you want a partner for making lean work at healthcare organizations, Weave has the services you can trust.

Integration With Lean Principles

You can count on Weave’s integrated solutions to help you make the most of lean philosophies in your healthcare organization. We have a track record of helping doctor’s offices, dentist’s offices, optometry offices, and similar facilities embrace lean strategies by implementing our solutions. We deliver better patient outcomes and employee satisfaction and buy-in.

Examples of Weave’s Lean Solutions

Below are some key examples of Weave’s solutions that aid in implementing lean management styles in healthcare.

• Digital forms: Embracing a paperless office is one of the primary ways to go lean. Digital records are easier to search and store than paper records, and copies are available to all employees at a workstation. Weave’s solutions include allowing patients to enter personal information and set appointments digitally, saving time when entering data for employees. Less data entry cuts down on potential errors, too.
• Communication: Using Weave’s technology to improve communication with patients makes your office more efficient. Automated text and email messages reduce no-shows for appointments. Personalized marketing efforts to current and new patients should deliver better response rates. When patients provide new information about an ailment, your employees can enter it digitally, and all caregivers have immediate access to it. Patients don’t have to repeat themselves, making the process smoother from start to finish.
• Billing: When Weave Payments streamlines billing workflow, your employees will spend less time chasing down payments. Patients can settle their bills online or through an app, increasing payment speeds. Our client statistics show that 83% of businesses receive payments faster using Weave’s solutions.

Count on Weave for Help With Making the Most of Lean Healthcare 

Embracing lean management philosophies in your healthcare organization can improve patient, employee, and bottom-line outcomes. You naturally streamline and improve processes by eliminating waste and deploying constant improvement efforts.

Let Weave be your medical facility’s partner when you seek to become a lean organization. To learn more about the services that we offer for helping with implementing lean health care, contact Weave for a free demo today.