Virginia Mason Medical Center, in the US city of Seattle, started losing money in 1998. Rather than panic, its then CEO, Dr. Gary Kaplan, looked to Toyota for a new management style to get the hospital back on track. Toyota has operated a lean production operation for almost a century – although the term wasn’t coined until the 1990s – but what does ‘lean’ working mean to the facilities manager in the healthcare sector? Lean principles are underpinned by the need to ‘improve flow’, which means getting the right things to the right place at the right time and in the right quantities. At the same time, the manager must strive to ‘eliminate waste’ which, in practice, means minimising waste where possible.
of how patient’s interact with staff and the building. The realisation? Patients were being ferried around the hospital inefficiently, which meant a considerable amount of time was being wasted. After seeing the results of the stream mapping exercise, Virginia Mason’s team could identify where time could be saved. Stream mapping They initially trialled the implementation on When implementing Toyota’s principles, the process of administering chemotherapy Kaplan started with stream mapping. This is treatments, which cut the time it took the process of taking a complex for the patient to be treated by activity and breaking it down 50 per cent. Other processes into steps, so you can L ean were then tackled, and identify where efficiency principl it was so successful can be improved. For e s are not that dozens of other Kaplan, this meant cutting about hospitals throughout tracing the patient’s c faster w osts or the US now evaluate journey on a map of in the same way. a hospital using a they’re orking – about m But it’s not just the US piece of blue wool. efficien ore that’s seeing the benefit Once the patient’s tu of lean principles. The journey had been time anse of Lean Six Sigma method mapped, Kaplan money d is now an international was presented with a phenomenon thanks to its E striking visual depiction
Issue 19.2 | HEALTH BUSINESS MAGAZINE
Written by Peter Brogan
What can a car company teach us about facilities management in the healthcare sector? Peter Brogan, head of Research & Insight at the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management, explores
Facilities management
The facilities management opportunity: As long as a ball of wool
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