Healthcare personnel focus on improving the safety of their patients.
The healthcare industry is getting pressure on increasing efficiency of care delivery. Quality improvement initiatives are coming up with solutions. With these initiatives, organizations are helped into boosting their performance outcomes, meeting their expectations, and deliver quality services.
Many quality improvement programs have been done over the years. Total quality management, continuous quality improvement, business process reengineering, and benchmarking are the programs that have been implemented. However, these programs have not delivered improved value to the patient. Lean six sigma stands out from the crowd since the programs implemented have not improved patient value.
The roots of six sigma principles are in manufacturing. It helps to streamline processes and reduce waste in the healthcare industry.
Applying lean six sigma principle to an organization is the same as diagnosing and treating a medical condition. In this case, issues should be dealt with by frontline workers who are closer to the problems and understand them well.
Applying this will make the nurses, doctors, and technician deal with solving key issues rather than the senior management.
Here are a number of benefits of lean six sigma. With lean six sigma processes, you can prevent medical errors, reduce mortality rates, decrease time spent in hospital, improvement inpatient care, and boost of quality.
These principles are also used to help reduce departmental sales, deliver better safety, and streamline practices. This help reduce healthcare costs a lot each year. This can mean the difference between life and death.
Healthcare is increasingly adopting lean six sigma for the past ten years. However, not every part of the industry is utilizing it especially in the areas of triage and post-surgery.
If one uses the lean six sigma methodology, the problems of departmental silos and unreliable data can be tackled. It also helps boost the revenue cycle. Patient collections has increased as well as savings.
Utilizing lean six sigma can also help complete improvement projects, save millions, and transform its excellence performance culture.
Knowing what they want to achieve can help healthcare managers make a difference in their organizations. What they need is an understanding of their current situations and the identification of issues to be tackled.
If you want to succeed then there is a need for communication and the fostering of a culture that embraces change. Six sigma can drive this change. With six sigma, there is an instant process for handling conflict, a methodology to test experiments, and the idea that data drives everything.
To have dramatic improvements in operations efficiency, there is a need to apply lean principles and combine it with machine learning and predictive analytics. But it is firs important to know and be an expert in six sigma before one can gain these benefits.