Now, more than ever, hospitals are being expected to do more with less. That’s where lean methodologies come in, says Healthcare Technologies Online (May 2, 2012). Lean methodologies, as we discuss in Chapter 16, are geared toward continuous process improvement, and there are two predominant lean schools of thought — Six Sigma and Kaizen. Each takes a slightly different 
The Kaizen philosophy also strives to include every employee into the process improvement initiative. Kaizen stresses that the real experts in any organization are the people who actually do the work each day, and these employees should be intimately involved in improving their own workflows. In healthcare, this could be a nurse in the emergency department, someone working in finance, a surgeon in the operating room, or an IT executive.
Each person has their own ideas for how their specific workflows could be more efficient. The idea of Kaizen is that a lot of little ideas evaluated and implemented at a local level can have a huge impact on an organization and can generally be implemented much more quickly and easily than a single million-dollar idea handed down from corporate. However, many employees don’t feel empowered to implement changes in their organizations, even if they are common sense solutions. Kaizen puts a structure in place that provides employees with this power.
Kaizen changes are often small, but when instituted in masse they can make a huge difference. For example, Franciscan St. Francis Health of Indianapolis estimates that its facility implemented nearly 4,000 Kaizen ideas last year that resulted in a multi-million dollar impact to the hospital’s bottom line.
Discussion questions:
1. Find and describe how another hospital has successfully implemented lean techniques.
2. Why don’t all hospitals embrace kaizen and six sigma tools?