Health care organizations must deliver high quality care while managing risks, but significant barriers and competing interests can prevent teams from effectively achieving tangible and timely results for patient safety initiatives.

Lean methodologies—which focus on reducing errors and defects in production—are especially fine-tuned tools and practices for creating lasting and sustainable improvements in patient safety and clinical quality. Our professionals can help your organization establish a culture that builds quality into every step of a process.

How the Process Works

We use the innovative principles of the Toyota Management System, in which each employee works as a safety inspector and alerts leadership of a potential or actual problem during production. Corrections are immediately made and entire production lines may even be halted when there’s risk that a mistake will become a defect in the next step of the process. We can help you establish and implement a stop-the-line process, enhance your organization’s culture of safety through Patient Safety Andon System and workshops, and drive reduction in harm.

During our clinical quality improvement work, you’ll learn to address chronic and sporadic problems in your complex and variable workflows. You’ll work to develop and implement better ways to identify and immediately correct problems that exist within a single unit or span multiple units or locations.  

By involving leadership and staff from various areas of a medical center, we address common challenges such as establishing culture change around serious safety events. We’ll also help you focus on fixing defects at the source, incident reporting and improvement plans, and sustainable solutions for clinical quality.

Workshop Overview

During workshops, we coach your leadership and staff to focus on addressing specific goals, emphasizing the importance of analyzing processes and testing ideas for improvements before implementing changes. Workshops are focused on making existing processes better or, in some cases, redesigning processes.

Our program includes:

• On-site assessment of your current quality and patient safety program
• Development of a stop-the-line process
• Value stream mapping workshop on incident reporting and response processes
• Mapping of high-risk processes and proactively creating plans for improvement
• A3 thinking and problem solving; plan, do, check, act (PDCA); and kaizen workshops

Benefits

We can help you create new infrastructure or fortify existing processes around patient safety and clinical quality programs.

With commitment to improvement, your organization can help:

• Significantly reduce lead time for reporting, tracking, and responding to safety concerns
• Prevent adverse and sentinel safety events and medication errors
• Reduce health care-acquired infections, medical errors, falls, surgical events, tubing misconnections, and more