Improving Health Care Performance Using Lean and the Theory of Constraints

Improving Health Care Performance Using Lean and the Theory of Constraints is a dynamic new program that will help your organization identify and eliminate bottlenecks, increase efficiency, and improve quality. Whether we bring this program to you, or you bring your organization to us, we’re fully prepared to design and deliver a customized, focus training.

If you are interested in commissioning this program specifically tailored to your organization, or any other custom programs, please contact Rebecca Moore at 617.432.2207 or rmoore@hsph.harvard.edu.

Program Overview

This two day program will help your organization:

  • Focus management attention on key issues driving performance
  • Solve performance and functional bottlenecks in hospitals and other health care delivery organizations
  • Increase operating room throughput by 20%
  • Improve the quality of care using existing resources
  • Reduce response time, increase output and improve quality

This program will provide participants with easy to implement, practical tools to improve the performance of their complex health care delivery organizations.  We show your managers how to understand the system within which they work, focus their efforts, and hone priorities, and at the same time learn tools to create more value, improve health care quality and efficiency, and reduce clinical response time.

During the program, everyone will be actively engaged in small group discussion that grapple with the range of outcomes resulting from the implementation of new tools and practices.  In addition, lectures and group assignments tailored to your organization will help participants identify the key improvement projects within your organization.

 

Program Objectives

This program will be customized to support your organization’s specific objectives, which may include the following:

  • Acquire practical tools to increase quality, reduce response times and increase your organization’s output, including learning how to manage variability in patient flow, integrating Lean with the Theory of Constraints, identifying and eliminating bottlenecks
  • Develop a sound analytical framework to support more effective decision-making, including how to avoid analysis paralysis
  • Expand skills for identifying and diagnosing discrete organizational and functional challenges
  • Building short and long-term performance measures that support organizational goals
  • Creating a shared language among your organization’s managers to improve communication and problem solving

 

Dynamic Topics

The final course design is the product of a highly collaborative development process that constantly focuses on your organization’s specific priorities.  Once we define success for the training program and understand the full range of learning objectives, we are able to consider a wide array of content that will best suit our objectives, including:

  • Creating value and value drivers in healthcare management
  • Avoiding analysis paralysis using the satisficer approach from economics
  • Bottleneck identification and Constraint Management
  • Increasing output the focusing steps of the Theory of Constraints (TOC)
  • Focusing tools: the focusing table and the focusing matrix
  • Reducing response times: integrating Lean with TOC
  • Performance measures in healthcare systems: keep it simple
  • The ‘complete kit’ concept
  • Global-Decision-Making: avoid local optimum lockup
  • Managing variability in patient flow

Organizations that will benefit from the program includes health care delivery organizations such as hospitals, clinics, and HMOs interested in improving efficiency, quality of care, resource allocation, and the quality of management decision-making.  Organizations will be encouraged to involve integrated teams of senior and middle managers in every department of the organization.

Organizations That Will Benefit

Organizations that will most benefit from this program include health care delivery organizations such as hospitals, clinics, and HMOs who need to improve efficiency, quality of care, resource allocation, and the quality of management decision-making.  Organizations are encouraged to consider commissioning this program for integrated teams of senior and middle managers and clinical leaders from all departments.

Boaz Ronen, PhD

Boaz Ronen is a Professor Emeritus at the Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University. He specializes in Healthcare Management, Technology Management and Value Creation. He holds a B.Sc in Electronics Engineering, M.Sc and Ph.D in Business Administration.  Prior to his academic career he worked for over 10 years in the Israeli Hi-Tech industry.  He recently won a life achievement award from the Theory of Constraints International Certification Organization (TOCICO).

Joseph S. Pliskin, PhD

Joseph Pliskin is Adjunct Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.  He is also Professor Emeritus at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev where he was a member of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management and of the Department of Health Systems Management. He received his BSc degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,and SM  and PhD degrees in Applied Mathematics (Operations Research) from Harvard University.