Lean Thinking in Health Care
Lakeshia R. Dingle
Grand Canyon University: HCA-240
May 14, 2016
Lean Thinking in Health Care “Health care is big business that has a major impact on our nation’s economy” (GCU Lecture 1). It is one that is highly regulated by both federal and state level governments as well as that of accrediting agencies.
Lean Thinking
In the 1950s Toyota came up with the idea of lean thinking which is a set of functioning ideas and techniques that helps generate the greatest importance for individuals by decreasing waste and delays” (Feeney, 2015). The purpose of this systematic approach was to change the establishments thought process and value, which would eventually lead to the conversion of the
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With the lean thinking process comes new ideas, systems and equipment that have been realistically applied to enhance the flow process. Methods used to deal with organization, standardization, exclusion of non-value added steps and overall visual control.
Ways of improving flow, removing waste and decrease delays, getting things correct the first time, therefore expanding quality and bring down costs. Lean Thinking also identifies ways to permit the personnel by encouraging them to maintain solutions through making respectable judgments based on evidence presented. The Office of Inspector General within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was created to as a self-governing and unbiased oversight unit of the department to carry out the mission of upholding economy, effectiveness and efficiency by eliminating fraud, abuse and waste. One of the biggest problems in health care is spending and the fact that managers are now giving the responsibility of ordering medical supplies to the technologists. They continue to overstock on supplies that are rarely used and the managers are allowing it happen. Today hospitals easily discard more than enough surgical equipment that could be saved and used to assist with those serious shortages, enhance surgical care and increase public health in other industrialized countries. “Maintaining and transporting such materials is truly a low-hanging fruit enterprise, a simple approach that could may have an
Health care spending in the United States of America as a percentage of the economy has reached astonishing heights, equating to 17.7 percent. This number is shocking when compared to other counties; in Australia health care is 8.9 percent, in United Kingdom 9.4 percent, in Canada 11.2 percent. If the American health care system were to hypothetically become its own economy, it would be the fifth-largest in the world. While these statistics sound troubling, they lead us to look for answers about the problems surrounding our system. The first health insurance company was created in the 1930s to give all American families an equal opportunity for hospital care and eventually led to a nationwide economic and social controversy that erupted in the 1990s and continued to be shaped by the government, insurance companies, doctors, and American citizens. In this paper, I will go in to detail about the various opinions regarding the controversy, the history behind health insurance companies, and the main dilemmas brought out by the health care crisis. Greedy insurance companies combined with high costs of doctor visits and pharmaceutical drugs or the inefficient hospitals all over America can only describe the beginning to this in depth crisis. Recently, the United States health care industry has become know for the outrageous costs of insurance models, developments of various social and health services programs, and the frequent changes in medicinal technology.
The American Health Care system needs to be constantly improved to keep up with the demands of America’s health care system. In order for the American Health Care system to improve policies must be constantly reviewed. Congress still plays a powerful role in public policy making (Morone, Litman, & Robins, 2008). A health care policy is put in place to reach a desired health outcome, which may have a meaningful effect on people. People in position of authority advocates for a new policy for the group they have special interest in helping. The Health care system is formed by the health care policy making process (Abood, 2007). There are public, institutional, and business policies related to health care developed by hospitals, accrediting organizations, or managed care organizations (Abood, 2007). A policy is implemented to improve the health among people in the United States. Some policies
Creating a health care reform plan for the U.S. health care system is no easy task. Multiple things must be taken into consideration. These include making insurance affordable, making sure the plan is economically feasible, and creating a plan that will still work in the future. What hindered the reshaping of health care into a sustainable system in the past, are the health sectors interests that prefer the status quo. By continuing to cling on to yesterday’s model, the health care industry is creating its own peril (Schaeffer, 2007).
The Affordable Care Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. The Affordable Care Act also nicknamed as “ObamaCare” faced huge amounts of adversity and challenges on its way to being ratified and upheld by the Supreme Court. Some of these arguments highlight the disadvantages of free social services, the escalating federal deficit, and the altering the healthcare industry’s landscape completely. Healthcare is generally defined as providing for the wellbeing of a personal through medical services. In America, all services come with a price, and healthcare has become an industry that is nearly only about the money and less about the patient. Needless to say, the quality of care that a patient receives is almost
In recent years, health care has been a huge topic in public debates, legislations, and even in deciding who will become the next president. There have been many acts, legislations, and debates on what the country has to do in regards to health care. According to University of Phoenix Read Me First HCS/235 (n.d.), “How health care is financed influences access to health care, how health care is delivered, the quality of health care provided, and its cost”.
Regulations that prevent insurance companies from participating in interstate commerce have caused competition to grow stagnant in the United States. This lack of competition has allowed the adoption of wasteful procedures by healthcare providers, which in turn passes the increased expenses back to the insurance companies. Therein, insurance costs increase, crippling consumer’s cash flow and quality of life. While healthcare costs continue to rise, people must scrutinize the current healthcare system.
The U.S. health care system consumes a huge amount of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, and is a massive system that provides essential and world-class care to millions of people (Niles, 2016). As a result of this huge burden of cost associated with it, the U.S. healthcare system has been critiqued, and has played a major role in sparking debates about changes to the way the U.S. healthcare system is run and organized. Thus, healthcare has been on the forefront of many American and politician minds over the last decade and beyond, and many proposals and attempts have been made to change and adapt the complex and influential U.S. healthcare system. One such attempt, that brought about incredibly influential change to the U.S. healthcare
The health sector is among the most important sectors in the United States economy. The government has enacted certain laws that affect the corporation’s activities and the insurance industry in general. The regulation affects competition among the health insurance companies, and the insurance industry in general.
It was considered to be overly structured and complicated, especially in the opinion of the CEO. He felt that lean management system enabled people’s involvement in the designing and improvement of processes more than that within the IT system. With the failure of initial IT implementation, CEO was of the opinion that “one size fits all” is not a feasible approach in Lean and IT amalgamation. Due to this, there were discrepancies of opinions among the executives as some believed IT systems could prove to be beneficial in the long run. Mr. Cremin believed that Lean manufacturing pushes the decisions down to people directly engaged in producing products. Incremented changes are key to innovation and continued improvement and an overly structured and complex IT system could interfere with the process innovation.
The lean thinking has been established in a well manner in the competitive world. The countless business industries have proved their effective growth in terms of brand recognition and in terms of the good profit amount with the effective application of the lean production system in their operational activities. Toyota has added their name in the application of the lean thinking in their production process first in the global competitive market. The book “the Gold mine” written by Freedy and Michael Balle is a definite attempt to highlight the challenges that the leaders are facing in the perfect transformation of the lean thinking in their operational activities. This essay has discusses the direct connection between the content the
Even though the complete implementation of lean thinking requires genuine and thoughtful leadership, the process involves various simple steps (Anthony, 2012). These simple steps include eliminating costs that create inefficiency and waste, using inefficient in-house options rather than partnerships, and getting the support of stakeholders. The other steps are neglecting supply chain efficiencies and restructuring a high-performance team or process.
Lean is defines the manufacturing philosophy that reduces the time between the shipping and customer demand, which based on the systematic method by eliminating waste, that means giving the customer what they want when they want it, and don 't waste whatever. Rahmana, Sharif and Esa (2013) suggested lean production is mentioned to improve the company 's performance from the philosophy in reducing waste in order. That means, lean system destination is the decrease cost by removing the non-value activities, which they are applying a category of tools and techniques for checking and eliminating defective in the production process. In the Evenort Company should emulate the five overriding principles of lean thinking in terms of implementing lean that there is guarantee the company has been driving correctly in the lean manufacturing (Cardiff 2015) as can show in table 1.
However, Chase et al (1998) identified lean themes as total visibility; respect for people; flexibility; continuous improvement (kaizen); synchronisation and balance; responsibility for the environment and a holistic approach. These two are similar as one must have respect for people while specifying value by putting their needs into consideration, the value stream needs to be identified and made to flow continuously and this can be achieved through synchronisation and balancing, the pull system depicts the flexibility approach and lastly both emphasize continuous improvement.
The actual market competition requires companies increasing quality and reducing cost by reducing any type of waste. The Toyota System production is based on two pillars: increase efficiency and reduce waste since the beginning of the process by developing details plan and activities focusing on long term results. Despite the fact of the simplicity definition of lead thinking, in practice developing lean thinking techniques is a challenging activity for companies especially in these competitive markets that requires quality, speed and customize products (Marutschke, 2012).
Lean is a process where creating more value to customers by minimizing wastage, time with less resources. Lean organization understand the customer value and try to increase proceed which adding more value to the business. In order to accomplish the lean thinking