Abstract
This work tries to answer the following question: can healthcare be engineered using lean management tools? Lean is known to achieve successful results when implemented in the manufacturing sector. Typical results are operational cost reduction, cycle time reduction, and higher customer satisfaction. The service sector, however, has seen mixed results. For the last two decades, educators and healthcare professionals are trying to implement lean tools in healthcare. Some reported success and many did not, for variety of reasons. In this paper, we search the literature and reveal the special nature of healthcare services, success factors, and barriers facing implementation of lean in healthcare. We then conduct a survey of 18 elite Jordanian hospitals to study the case holistically. Statistical analysis of the survey results confirmed some of what the literature revealed; organizational leadership seems to be the most dominant factor, followed by knowledge of employees about lean, training, and patient satisfaction (customer focus). Another important finding, not captured by the literature, is that lean implementation success depends on educating physicians about continuous improvement and lean and ensuring they are part of the improvement team. Based on the revealed enablers and obstacles, we created a full lean implementation framework. This framework was then used along with selected engineering tools to implement lean in a major hospital successfully. Implementation results showed 60% of reduction in cycle time, 80% reduction in operational cost, and many other benefits.
Highlights
In a highly competitive world, all industrial and service sectors work relentlessly to save cost and enhance market standing
Results and Discussion e case hospital is an ideal candidate to perform the experiment of lean implementation since it has a leadership that is willing to try any initiative under the umbrella of continuous improvement
In addition to improvements seen in cycle time and walking distances, emergency room (ER) saw a number of other benefits including the following: (i) Minimizing all waiting times that lowers patient satisfaction
Summary
In a highly competitive world, all industrial and service sectors work relentlessly to save cost and enhance market standing. Healthcare organizations face even more challenges in keeping up with the competition and the cost of providing medical services. Delivering a high-quality medical service at an acceptable cost is the objective of owners and managers [1]. Many organizations used quality initiatives to achieve this challenging objective, but the journey is not always successful [2,3,4]. Many organizations were able to achieve some success in reducing cost, minimizing errors and improving profitability [8], but success is not always the result of lean implementation. Lean implementation in healthcare has seen mixed success results; Barnabeet al. [9] declared that actual impact of lean is still a puzzle, since some see success with it and some do not. Similar notion is seen in the literature [10,11,12]
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