An integrated resilience engineering-lean management approach to performance assessment and improvement of clinical departments

Abstract

Clinics are the backbone of the healthcare system in all nations, providing a vast array of services, including patient diagnosis and treatment. One critical step to warranting patient safety and health is to improve the performance of clinical departments. To this end, this paper integrated resilience engineering (RE) and lean management (LM) principles to propose a comprehensive framework for evaluating and enhancing the performance of clinical departments. Initially, the Best-Worst Method was utilized to determine the relative importance of each indicator. Afterward, a validated questionnaire was administered to clinical department specialists to collect the required data. The data envelopment analysis model was then employed to evaluate the clinical department in a real-world case study. In addition, the impact of each indicator on the clinical department was analyzed using robustness analysis and statistical tests. The outcomes indicated the ranking of clinics from best to worst performance. Furthermore, the best and worst indicators for each clinic and the entire clinical department were determined. Moreover, a strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats analysis was used to propose appropriate strategies to improve the performance of a clinical department. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to quantitatively evaluate the performance of clinical departments in terms of RE and LM indicators. The framework presented in this study can be implemented in various healthcare units to improve their RE- and LM-related performance.