Lean management approach in health sector: MCDM model proposal to prevention of waste

Abstract

Lean manufacturing in the manufacturing sector corresponds to lean management in the service sector. When health services are considered, it is seen that the concepts that are important in the manufacturing sector have the same importance for health services. Because waste is the main problem of every sector. Lean management approach in the health sector enables improvements by developing solutions to many other problems of healthcare professionals, patients and hospitals, such as reducing transaction costs, ensuring patient safety, and reducing processing times. This study was carried out with the aim of establishing a lean health system by selecting the most appropriate lean management methodology in order to identify and prevent waste in health processes and to increase efficiency and service quality. In the study, the evaluation of lean methodologies that can be applied to prevent waste in health services is considered as a multi-criteria decision-making problem and a model has been proposed. In the proposed model, wastes were determined as research criteria and lean methodologies were determined as research alternatives. The solution phase of the problem was carried out in two stages with multi-criteria decision-making techniques. In the solution phase, the importance weights of 24 decision criteria were calculated with the SWARA method, while 5 alternatives were evaluated based on the decision criteria with the WASPAS method and the most suitable alternative was selected.