Healthcare institutions are facing serious challenges nowadays: more focus on the overall patient experience, pressure on costs, lack of trained personnel,... An overall strategy is needed to deal with these emerging necessities.. Our experience with Lean as business strategy for improvement in healthcare can also help you !

The combination of focus on value for the patient, creating better flow throughout the organization, both in the direct care as supporting processes, and a sustained bottom-up improvement culture results in better morale and better use of resources at all levels and more satisfied patients. Freeing up time due to the elimination and reduction of waste (non value-added activities) results in the ability to help more patients, in a more effective way, and all this without sacrificing quality. 

Healthcare institutions, especially in the UK and the US, have already been applying lean principles with great succes, and now, similar initiatives are starting in hospitals in different countries. 

Healthcare environments are very interesting for implementing Lean: first of all there is the combination of multiple interacting service, information and material flows, resulting in a rather complex environment where people and departments are typically 'shared resources'. On top of that there is an important variability both at the input side as well as within the processes that needs to be dealt with. 

Over the last years we have been developing specific training/coaching programs for Lean in Healthcare that we have conducted for several hospitals in the Netherlands and Belgium. Besides that we are constantly working on adapting lean and industrial engineering tools and techniques, taking into account the specific challenges of the healthcare environment, so they can be incorporated into a more effective overall approach for implementing Lean.