What Healthcare Can Teach Remodeling about LEAN with Liz Moisan – [Best of PowerTips Unscripted]

PowerTips Unscripted

Toyota pioneered the LEAN manufacturing system, and we know — houses aren’t cars. But neither are people, and the LEAN concept of continuous improvement is used by hospitals too.

So even if remodeling isn’t brain surgery, we can learn a lot from how LEAN has been applied in healthcare. You can get some of the best help with your business by looking at how other industries use continuous improvement.

In this episode, Liz Moisan talks to Victoria and Mark about using LEAN principles in healthcare and how it can be applied to remodeling. She says Kaizen or LEAN principles give you a common language for things we already know, creating a foundation to move forward.

Liz is a product innovation specialist at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, and has been a practitioner of the Virginia Mason Production System since 2008. She teaches, facilitates, and works to continually evolve how Kaizen is applied in a health-care setting. She’s married to R/A Roundtables member Matt Moisan.

The hospital employs daily Kaizen, so even the smallest roadblock can be eliminated, as well as higher-level applications. She shares some real-world examples, including cutting down on waiting times for patients (yay!), working with vendors to get what the hospital needs when it needs it, The Five Ss, and how to look at a particular process to improve it, including:

• Where to start
• Staying true to the tools
• Identifying and eliminating waste in processes
• The evolution of continuous improvement
• Breaking the status quo and getting buy-in
• Understanding supply and demand for materials
• Onboarding new employees in LEAN principles
• Training at the management level
• Finding the “rock in your shoe”
• When and why to get help
• And more …

Here are those two books Liz recommends for getting started understanding the Kaizen principles:

1. The Toyota Way
2. Transforming Healthcare: Virginia Mason Medical Center’s Pursuit of the Perfect Patient Experience

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