Leveraging Lean in Outpatient Clinics : Creating a Cost Effective, Standardized, High Quality, Patient-Focused Operation

This book is part of a series of titles that are a spin-off of the Shingo Prize-winning book Leveraging Lean in Healthcare: Transforming Your Enterprise into a High Quality Patient Care Delivery System. Each book in the series focuses on a specific aspect of healthcare—including emergency departments, medical laboratories, outpatient clinics, ancillary services, and surgical services—that has demonstrated significant process and quality improvements after a Lean implementation.

Because ambulatory care settings play a significant role in the healthcare delivery system, it is important to understand how Lean concepts and tools can be used to deliver high-quality, cost-effective care. Leveraging Lean in Outpatient Clinics: Creating a Cost Effective, Standardized, High Quality, Patient-Focused Operation provides a functional understanding of Lean processes and quality improvement techniques in an outpatient clinic environment.

This book is an ideal guide for healthcare executives, leaders, process improvement team members, and inquisitive frontline workers who want to implement and leverage Lean in outpatient clinical settings. Supplying detailed descriptions of Lean tools and methodologies, it identifies powerful Lean solutions specific to the needs of outpatient facilities.

The first section provides an overview of Lean concepts, tools, methodologies, and applications. The second section focuses on the application of Lean in the outpatient clinic environment. It presents illustrative examples of Lean deployments in primary care, GI, and preadmission testing clinics. The examples provide broad content which can be readily transferable to other outpatient clinic settings.

Illustrating leadership’s role in achieving departmental goals, this book will provide you with a well-rounded understanding of how Lean can be applied to achieve significant improvements throughout the complete continuum of care.

Preface : Outpatient Clinic Settings
Acknowledgments
Authors

Section 1
Chapter 1 : Introduction to Lean
Chapter 2 : Batching vs. Lean Thinking and Flow
Chapter 3 : Lean and Change Management
Chapter 4 : Lean Foundation
Chapter 5 : Basic Lean Concepts and Tools – Assessment and Analyze
Chapter 6 : Putting It All Together
Chapter 7 : Implementing Lean in a Healthcare Environment
Chapter 8 : Executives and Lean
Chapter 9 : Roles and Responsibilities of Managers and Supervisors
Chapter 10 : What It Means to Have a Lean Culture

Section 2
Chapter 11 : Lean in the Outpatient Clinic Setting

Appendix : Glossary
Index