Pharmacist Clinical Process Improvement: Applying Lean Principles in a Tertiary Care Setting

摘要

Providing quality health care efficiently is challenging. One quality improvement approach, which originated in the manufacturing sector, is Lean. Lean is a set of principles and tools used to create a culture of improvement. Essential principles of Lean management include continuous improvement, creating value by eliminating waste, finding purpose, front-line innovation, using visual standards, and implementing standard work or standardized process steps. Although these principles are readily applicable to manufacturing processes, they need to be adapted for use in health care. The focus of Lean in health care has been to define value, map value streams, and reduce or eliminate non-value-added activities or wastes. Workflow improvements result from identifying and reducing wastes, where major waste categories include defects, motion, transportation, overprocessing, overproduction, inventory, unused talent, and waiting. Using Lean methodology in health care to look for (and then eliminate) wastes is not new.