Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Facts About Lean Six Sigma Healthcare

By Krystal Branch


Medical executives with the desire to be part of bringing solutions with regard to controlling healthcare costs and quality must have found better means to do that through implementation of lean six sigma healthcare projects. These are important projects that assist in developing a positive culture in the health care facility that is committed towards reducing loopholes and enhancing service delivery. For this to succeed a number of things must be considered.

Quality customer service and satisfaction is of great importance to any health care facility. However, this is not just restricted to offering proper treatment but also involves other important services like availability of rooms, proper billing systems, open and transparent communication among other things. It becomes important to select projects that would bring about substantial improvements in service delivery.

Some of these projects for the medical facilities could also involve effective work-flow of clinical procedures of administering medication and the billing and registration systems. These are all critical activities that are also significant although you cannot improve all of them simultaneously. The best way to handle this is through prioritization of the projects depending on order of importance and urgency and hospital main goals.

Selecting and prioritizing areas that require immediate improvement is key meaning some important guidelines should be followed when selecting the projects in a health care facility. When prioritizing the needed projects, you must give significance to customer needs and also understand critical quality elements well. The customer does not need to be the patient only; it can be anyone at the facility including the nurses, doctors and administrators.

You need to appreciate the multifaceted nature of the problem at hand. When the complexity with measurable response variables is higher, then the prospects of these projects will be better. You can actually deal with some of these problems by use of appropriate tools required to speed up the process and which can be incorporated to situations the need facilitation and direction.

One way to succeed with sigma projects is to ensure there are visible output and input processes going on. Among the common traits include clear set goals, feasibility of data and resources, identifiable benefits of the initiative to clients and configuration for key care facility issues. Moreover, there should be significant progress on implementation of projects.

It is good for the team to establish the main problem when they collect data and find a solution that is beneficial to the organization. The organization can benefit a lot from performing simple projects that assure instant results and also act a boost for other projects, so it is advisable to select time-bound projects to bring more meaning and durable results. Additionally, when the projects have no controversy the results will even be better with no opposition.

Medical institutions should work on selection of practical lean six sigma healthcare projects that will bring measurable results and benefits to their organization. Depending on the needs and priorities of each organization, they must choose their projects well. This will bring about visible changes that will help provide the best services for their clients.




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