Improvement of Health Care System by Using Lean Tools: A Case Study

Abstract

Densely populated countries like Bangladesh are facing challenges in the health care system with overcrowding, cost containment, and inadequate arrangement of the health care center in terms of increasing demand from patients. Running health care systems all over the country both private and public are unable to satisfy patients because of miss management, waste of time, and the lack of service. To identify and reduce the problem in the health care system, lean management plays an important role all over the world. Value stream mapping (VSM) is one of the proven widely used Lean techniques, to identify the flow of work, information, and structure for reducing waste of time and service stress which helps to make a good relationship between administration and service holder. VSM is a very primary stage in the Bangladesh health care system. This research aims to improve the health care system in Bangladesh and the study focuses on applying VSM at the cardiology department in Khulna Medical College Hospital, Khulna, Bangladesh. A patient survey is done for comparison of numerical results to real-life data in the cardiology department of Khulna Medical College hospital. In this study it could be shown that after implementing the VSM technique, the patient capacity increased by 39%, Ideal time improve 9.62% as well as utilizing time increase by 38.46%. This result inspires large scale implementation of the lean tool in the health care sector of a country like Bangladesh.