Reducing Patient-Flow Delays in Outpatient Surgery Setting Through Kaizen Methods

Abstract

Healthcare organizations are looking for new opportunities to reduce the costs of healthcare without sacrificing the quality of patient care. Particularly, outpatient surgery has a very large share of healthcare service categories as well as remains the highest cost in overall outpatient visit service. Thus, the aim of this study is to demonstrate a case study that how to reduce outpatient patient-flow delays in a large U.S. Southeastern University Health Sciences Center by using a six-step kaizen framework. Through this framework, we identified the patient-flow delay problems in outpatient surgery process, organized the potential solutions and plans, provided several empirical measures to improve the efficient of in the surgery process, and subsequently introduced a healthcare information system for addressing the delay issues in the admitting process, patient late to the outpatient surgical units, and incomplete paperwork. Finally, this case indicated that by implementing kaizen methods to improve patient-flow delays not only saved a large amount of cost (a yearly estimated savings of $256,800), but patient care efficiency, process feasibility, and patient satisfactions were increased.