Lean Six Sigma

Our Lean Six Sigma for Healthcare Program, we offer practical training and mentoring support for all levels of the organization, through the following workshops: Lean Six Sigma Executive Overview, Lean Six Sigma Champion Training, Lean Six Sigma Awareness Training, Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Training, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Training or Lean Six Sigma Master Training.

Lean Six Sigma is a strategy that combines the methodologies of Lean and Six Sigma into one seamlessly integrated excellence strategy.

Lean provides a relentless organizational focus upon eliminating any non value added consumption of resources. Non value added, in the context of Lean, is defined as anything that the customer (or patient) would not be willing to pay for if left to his/her own devices. While on the surface it might seem that most anything done in a healthcare environment is done for the benefit of the patient, a deeper look reveals that in fact many activities are simply the result of constraints put upon the business by itself. One example might be the continual checking of information due the lack of clear interdepartmental handoffs. Another could be the consumption of labor in the business office used to correct mistakes, leading to denials and claim rejections that were made earlier in the process. All of these activities not only inhibit the patient experience by increasing wait times and errors, they also burden the cost structure of the organization. Lean is a powerful strategy, not only for enhancing the patient experience, but boosting financial results as well.

Six Sigma drives a relentless focus on eliminating errors in processes. Healthcare organizations face not only liability and compliance risk due to errors being generated every day, labor efficiencies also suffer dramatically as a result of repetitious inspection and rework. One could easily argue that Six Sigma is a subset of Lean itself. Any errors or resulting consequences, in the context of Lean, are by definition not value added. Six Sigma provides another, more sophisticated set of tools supporting a Lean Strategy.

Our Lean Six Sigma consulting program addresses the issues of non value added resource consumption and errors by equipping your associates with the know-how to do both. The Lean Six Sigma training program integrates Lean process improvement tools and statistically based methods to identify inefficiencies, whether they be driven by flow related issues or variation and error related issues.

All Lean Six Sigma Practitioner Training such as Green Belt and Black Belt Training are delivered in an apprenticeship or ‘residency’ approach. Practitioners receive quick, effective training, and are able to immediately apply the new knowledge to projects assigned by leadership. Thus the training not only enhances the skill set in the organization, but simultaneously drives results via the project work.

Below are some results that a Lean Six Sigma for Healthcare program will deliver:

Medication error reduction
Increased Patient Throughput
Patient Access wait time reductions
Improved clinical patient monitoring
Increased standardization of protocols
Improved clinical outcomes
ED diversion status reduction
Increased utilization of evidence based medicine
Medical records processing speed increases
Floor space requirement reductions
Ancillary results turnaround time reduction
Improved staffing models
Procedure charging error and omission reduction
Supplies charging error and omission reduction
Billing error reduction
Denial reduction

For more information about Lean Six Sigma in Healthcare, Contact Us.