Manufacturing Plant Inspires Hospital Infrastructure
Virginia Mason Hospital and Medical Center in Seattle, Washington had been planning to update the hospital’s systems and infrastructure. The intent was to improve patient satisfaction, safety and quality of healthcare. When hospital executives began considering options to restructure the system, they examined the Toyota Production System. America’s Health Insurance Plans posted an article describing how this manufacturing model has modified the Virginia Mason systems.
Executives went to Japan in 2002 to visit manufacturing plants for both Yamaha and Toyota, evaluating models for lean manufacturing to determine if these processes could be adopted for healthcare. The overall philosophy of lean manufacturing is to eliminate production defects and eliminate waste.
The trips have continued and, to date, almost 200 employees of Virginia Mason have visited Japan. Another trip is planned for the summer of 2008. The hospital officials suggest that these trips are essentially leadership training endeavors and that the benefits outweigh the costs.
The Virginia Mason CEO and Chairman notes that people are, of course, different from cars. Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learned from Toyota; the company is well known for its attention to customers and overall customer satisfaction. Insights from these trips have drawn attention to the limited use of information technology specialists and the need to reduce system wastes across healthcare systems in the U.S.
Seven different types of waste within the healthcare system were noted. Wasting time is one, such as when patients have to wait to be seen by clinicians. Inventory waste entails amassing more materials and/or information than is required and overproduction waste is the production of more than is necessary.
Simple steps were employed at the hospital to address both inventory and overproduction. Virginia Mason developed a new system to notify clinical staff when restocking is required in the clinical settings, for items such as gauze, tongue depressors, and patient information brochures.
A patient safety alert system was also developed, based on insights from the Toyota model. Instead of addressing mistakes after the fact or not discussing them at all, clinicians now signal a problem when it occurs. This allows these issues to be immediately addressed. It also opens the door to developing prevention strategies if common alerts are issued.
To date, system benefits have been noted. The time before patients receive laboratory results has been shortened by 85 percent and inventory costs were reduced by $1 million. In one year, the facility was able to reduce staff overtime and temporary labor expenses by half a million, while simultaneously increasing productivity more than 90 percent.
Virginia Mason has future efforts planned to further streamline care within their system. Noting the changes, including patient satisfaction and decreased costs, this model may provide a springboard for modifying the entire healthcare schema across the country.
March 24, 2008 Related topics: General Management & Administration, Partnerships & Consortia