Books
Illustrating the leadership behaviors required to achieve sustainable success, the book is ideal for leaders in the healthcare industry looking to initiate Lean improvements to clinical and non-clinical processes. It reviews the fundamentals of Lean and explains how to link a strategy of continuous improvement to corporate strategy to achieve operational excellence. It also describes how to mitigate the risk of failure when undergoing large-scale corporate change―including what can go wrong and how to prevent these failures.
The book includes case studies that share the time-tested insights of healthcare team members and leaders. It outlines a management system for sustaining your Lean improvements and provides the Lean leadership approaches, thoughts, and visual tools you’ll need to guide your organization along the path toward world-class healthcare performance.
Lean Leadership for Healthcare is available for sale here on Amazon.
Taking Improvement from the Assembly Line to Healthcare: The Application of Lean within the Healthcare Industry supplies step-by-step guidance on how to implement Lean methods to achieve world-class improvement within the healthcare industry. Specific examples of this approach are provided in emergency medicine, diagnostic imaging, orthopedic clinics, general internal medicine, administration, and community care. Highlighting quality, safety, and financial evidence as to why immediate change is both possible and essential, the book provides a firm foundation in Lean improvement and the tools used to deliver sustainable solutions. It presents client interviews and case studies from the U.S. and Canada to provide readers with the real-world understanding needed to embark and sustain a successful improvement journey.
With two decades of experience in industrial operations management, Ronald Bercaw details a proven approach for discovering waste and delivering improvement in healthcare organizations. He presents powerful insights gained through successful Lean implementations in private industry, U.S. and Canadian healthcare systems, U.S. Pentagon business systems, U.S. Surgeon General assignments, and U.S. Navy, Army, and Air Force maintenance applications.
Providing a comprehensive view of improvement within and outside the walls of the hospital and clinic, the book reveals valuable lessons learned and mitigation strategies to increase your chances of success. It identifies and addresses the leadership challenges that are likely to emerge and includes a detailed roadmap to provide you with the tools needed to achieve sustainable improvements in quality, patient safety, productivity, and staff development and engagement.
Watch Ronald Bercaw discuss how to apply the Toyota Production System to the healthcare industry.
We are pleased to offer our first book available for sale on Amazon in support of Lean Healthcare.
The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a reflection of the way your organization conducts business. If you’re looking to make lasting improvements in the delivery of care, you must start with looking at the system from your patient’s perspective to understand what is of value and what is simply waste. When you begin seeing in this way, you’ll begin building in this way. When you begin building in this way, you’ll begin driving improvements in your care delivery. Only then will your EHR be able to support lasting improvements, driving better patient care and outcomes at lower costs.
Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to improve on all fronts. This can be achieved, but only by changing the very way we look at care. No longer can we look at care just from the organization or provider’s perspective; we must start with the end in mind – the patient. Compelling case studies, discussed throughout this book, demonstrate that modifying processes and workflows using Lean methodologies lead to substantial improvements. These changes must be undertaken in a clear, consistent, and methodical manner. When implementing an EHR based on existing workflows and sometimes antiquated processes, organizations struggle to sustain improvements.
Many organizations have deployed an EHR and now face optimization challenges, including the decision to move to a new EHR vendor. The financial implications of upgrading, optimizing or replacing an EHR system are significant and laden with risk. Choose the wrong vendor, the wrong system, or the wrong approach and you may struggle under the weight of that decision for decades. Organizations that successfully leverage the convergence of needs – patients demanding better care, providers needing more efficient workflows and organizations desiring better financials – will survive and thrive.
This book ties together current healthcare challenges with proven Lean methodologies to provide a clear, concise roadmap to help organizations drive real improvements in the selection, implementation, and on-going management of their EHR systems. Improving patient care, improving the provider experience and reducing organizational costs are the next frontier in the use of EHRs and this book provides a roadmap to that desired future state.