We often come across as patient or visitor to hospital grumbles about delayed doctor consultation, avoidable diagnostic test conducted, mistaken patient bills on regular basis. The hospital team ma…
Source: TOYOTA APPROACH: AN ANSWER FOR PATIENT FRIENDLY HOSPITAL
We often come across as patient or visitor to hospital grumbles about delayed doctor consultation, avoidable diagnostic test conducted, mistaken patient bills on regular basis. The hospital team make efforts to resolve these issues but still problems repeat again and again. The major incidents which has threatened patient safety often end put in blaming individual rather than diagnosing problems associated with process associated with incident. The hospital authorities tend to focus more towards increasing patient footfall and providing more facilities to clinicians and tend to ignore repeated trigger from patients.
The patient journey in hospital starts from greeting by security at hospital enternace and end after receipt of discharge related information from nurse and doctor. The patient comes across various clinical and nonclinical processes provided by various group of hospital staff during his/her stay in hospital.
Few hospitals seek help of external service consultants to address the voice of patients. The service consultants use quality tools like Six Sigma to address these problems. No doubt the hospital will get benefit out of same but after sometime, the improvement slips back to old habits if hospital staff don’t imbibe improvement in their routine process.
How to make improvement across hospital looking through patient as funnel?
Adopting lean methodology as practiced in Toyota plants across world will help hospital to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness in their processes. The 14 principals (given in pictures) practiced religiously in Toyota can be adopted (wherever applicable) in hospital.
I have been practicing few principals at my hospital and able to resolve major issues .I would request you to take look at these time tested principles & adopt them in your hospital.
I will shortly come up with few case studies of these SIMPLE yet POWERFUL principles in next blogs.Please do give your feedback on this blog.
Deepak.Agarkhed
deepakagarkhed@gmail.com
Medical Equipment facility planning 