A Lean/Continuous Improvement (CI) culture in health care organizations leads to the achievement of strategic goals by means of a serious commitment to excellence in quality while developing and sustaining an integral patient centered care system.
Most strategic plans for health care institutions can be defined by three main pillars:
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Improvement of Quality: engaging patients as partners to achieve excellence in health care services.
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Maximization of Value Added services: so as to excel at providing health care to patients while being financially sustainable.
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Build an Exceptional Team: in order to be able to achieve team synergy in the organizational efforts to provide unparalleled health care.
The implementation of a Lean/CI culture in health care institutions provides tangible results while addressing and focusing on the improvement of specific and well determined key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to enhance operational efficiency as for instance eliminating bottlenecks in a hospital workflow, both internally and within the sub-LHIN, so that cycle times can be reduced and provide more value to patients in a shorter period of time. A few examples of KPIs are listed below.