Lean Management Case Study

Improved Essays
Opportunities for improvement using Lean Management and Six Sigma principles
The lean management principle originally came from the Toyota manufacturing system and it refers to the concept of reducing waste and eliminating defects during the production process. In lean management, firms analyze their operations to point out wastes and areas of inefficiencies before developing solutions to minimize these wastes and promote efficiency. While lean management principles are largely applied in the manufacturing setting, the lean principles have been successfully applied in the healthcare setting (Yaduvanshi & Sharma, 2017). The Six sigma concept originally came from Motorola and it involves a customer-centered approach, the use of quantitative data in the decision making process, and cost reduction initiatives (McLaughlin & Olson, 2017).
To assess the productivity of PCS, different metrics would be used to assess service quality as well as measure service productivity. The metrics for service quality will include structural quality and process quality while the metrics for measuring service productivity will include inputs and outputs. Based on the above metrics, various opportunities for improvement exist for Physician Care Services, Inc. (PCS).
The first opportunity for improvement is improving service quality by reducing the waiting time for patients. According to the hospital, the total service time is about 20 minutes but there are patients who wait for up to 90 minutes

Related Documents

  • Great Essays

    Improving the health care system can play a crucial role in the delivery of safe, cost effective patient care. Many governing bodies mandate quality improvement in healthcare. Quality improvement initiatives are a result of systems failure. A thorough investigation into the failure can reveal where and how the system can make improvements.…

    • 967 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “Lean manufacturing, on the other hand, tackles the inefficiencies throughout the value streams of an organization. Eliminating or minimizing the eight wastes, lowers costs, while short runs make it easy to spot and deal with quality issues. These areas are addressed by the lean manufacturing approach. However, lean manufacturing alone will not lead to a Six Sigma quality level (Ward et al,2015).” This approach is suggested because unlike Chipotle quality does not seem to be a factor.…

    • 1043 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Review, 2011). Patients, on average, have to wait a standard of about 3 weeks for a scheduled time to see a doctor; and when the individual shows up, they will need to wait even longer (Harvard Business Review, 2011). The solution to this is to focus on cutting down the wait times and setting goals to do so. These organizations would need to be kept accountable by the use of online evaluation websites; this would encourage medical facilities to maintain customer fulfillment rankings as this would be connected to wait time (Stempniak, 2013). I think this would be a very valuable tool because so many people utilize evaluation sites; cars, restaurants and even apartments.…

    • 339 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Six Sigma is data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects and is a great tool that can look at a process and come up with a plan to improve so that waste and cost are reduced. I…

    • 456 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The data collected includes patient satisfaction, conformity to product requirements, characteristics and trends, supplier performance, internal audit findings, and data to support organizational goals and improvement from management review. When nonconforming products are detected the organization takes appropriate actions. They Maintain documents hospital-wide process for investigation and effective implementation of preventative actions to eliminate the cause of potential problems in order to prevent this occurrence; when the quality improvement is an effective the whole process begins over again. One example of quality improvement within our organization is tracking patient satisfaction. Surveys are sent home with patients for them to evaluate the hospital.…

    • 1057 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Title: Factors of readmissions and reducing unnecessary readmissions to provide a better health care service. Thesis: The health care organizations have big opportunity to improve their quality of healthcare as well as improve life quality of customers through reducing the avoidable readmissions. I. Introduction Thesis: The health care organizations have big opportunity to improve their quality of healthcare as well as improve life quality of customers through reducing the avoidable readmissions. II.…

    • 276 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Lean Six Sigma Project

    • 682 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Informants had an average continuous process improvement experience of at least 22 years with the majority of their health care experience being in large academic tertiary hospitals and military hospitals. All the informants were formally trained in LSS and achieved the certification level of Master Black Belt. In Lean Six Sigma programs, the Master Black Belt certification level is the highest level attainable and symbolizes mastery of LSS topics and experiences in leading large-scale LSS process improvement projects (10). Key informants provided six common themes to barriers that impact sustainability of LSS improvements in health care, and are explained below. These six themes were categorized further into two main topics: lack of leadership commitment to drive a culture of quality and inadequately trained and unqualified LSS practitioners to execute LSS projects in health…

    • 682 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Through the use of quality management models health care organizations will make patient care more safer, more efficient, patient-centered, timely, effective and equitable (Peter & Peter, 2015). In fact the use of several QI models have reduce the number of overall amount of defects in health care. This can be seen as emergency departments began to use Six Sigma to take a cost-model approach towards improving patient care, increase patient flow, and reduce costs. Through the use of Six Sigma EDs are able to establish a cost benefit analysis that is able to give a distribution of costs to each hour spent by…

    • 984 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Blake Memorial Hospital

    • 570 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Blake Memorial Hospital (BMH) has been suffering from the decline in quality of care and financial difficulties. To break through the current hardship, I would like to make the two recommendations. One is to redesign the public office relation survey so that we can figure out the quality of care problem. The other is to implement Lean Six Sigma analysis to streamline the workflow. At least entire FY 2018 is necessary to turn BMH around.…

    • 570 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Waiting Room Microsystem

    • 530 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In order to improve this microsystem, wait times must be decreased so that more patients will be triaged and seen by a doctor within 30 minutes and that the nurse to patient ratio is no more than one to four. In order to achieve this objective more medical staff will be hired which will include medical assistants, nurses and physician assistants. There will also be designated areas separating patients by the severity of their illnesses and injuries. The waiting room will have three designated areas.…

    • 530 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Measure Improved Quality

    • 110 Words
    • 1 Pages

    Measuring and improving quality across the board can be a challenging task. However, any organization can do it with the proper procedures and steps to improve their quality ratings. Some of the ways to measure quality and improve experience of care can be found under the Institute of Medicine. First introduce in 1987 by Picker under the Commonwealth Program for Patient-Centered Care with the emphasis to improve patient care and experience of care (Ransom, 2008). Initially started as surveys to explore the concerns and needs of patients as means to improve quality.…

    • 110 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Week 3 Homework: What is a reasonable time to keep patients waiting? In the waiting room, patients should be waiting less than 10 minutes to get called on and get into the exam room. In the exam room the patient should be waiting less than 20 minutes to see the doctor not the tech or the nurse.…

    • 829 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Lean Management: Lean management puts the customer first. The customer must find value from the collection of the raw material to the sale. “Lean manufacturing is a competitive philosophy adopted by many companies to produce cost effective products and services” ((Allada & Srinivasaraghavan,…

    • 860 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The more times that the customers visit their healthcare facilities, the better the revenue increases. Although healthcare facilities seek to reduce the number of times that customers or patients visit their healthcare facilities, they also rely on recurrent visits to maintain their costs, notwithstanding the need to increase the profit margin. Consequently, the more customers the health facility can attract and retain the better it becomes in terms of profitability. Consequently, every effort made by these healthcare providers is to increase the quality of care in the pretext that clients will make these facilities as the ultimate destinations for service…

    • 1733 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    TITEFLEX CASE STUDY Strategy Analysis from the Case Study Customer-driven The customer is the final arbiter of product and service quality and customer loyalty, retention and market share gain are best optimised through a clear focus on the needs of current and potential customers. Significant Benefits: • Market share gain • A clear understanding of how to deliver value to the customer • Minimised transaction costs • Long term success. (study guide pg 22) From the case we learned that Simpson felt sandwiched between very angry customers and needed a good strategy to deal with irate customers, and two of Titeflex customers had told Simpson they were considering dropping Titeflex as a supplier.…

    • 1088 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays