23 October, 2024

The sprawling healthcare sector in the United States is incredibly complex. This complicated landscape includes diverse groups of healthcare providers, patients, and insurance providers and plans. All of these individuals and organizations operate within an environmental rife with unstandardized pricing, evolving medical advancements, competing technologies, and ever-growing demands for documentation and data analysis.

The result is the most expensive — and one of the most inefficient — healthcare systems in the world. Approximately 30% of healthcare spending is wasteful, with administrative complexity alone racking up almost $266 billion each year.

These inefficiencies can have a devastating effect on individuals and populations. Expensive healthcare costs may be less of a concern if it resulted in better outcomes, however, the U.S. does not have significantly better health outcomes than similarly developed countries. In fact, the U.S. performs in the bottom half of comparable countries in the areas of life expectancy, infant mortality, unmanaged asthma, unmanaged diabetes and safety during childbirth.

The issues present in the healthcare sector are, frankly, overwhelming. But, the future of healthcare administration and delivery is not hopeless. Healthcare professionals are increasingly looking to Lean Six Sigma (LSS) methodology as a source of significant improvement. Implementing processes based on LSS approaches can help healthcare systems institute not just a culture of continuous improvement but also the means to truly achieve it.

The Case for Continuous Improvement With Lean Six Sigma

“Continuous improvement” is more than just a corporate buzzword or project management jargon. The continuous process improvement model is a comprehensive approach to identifying problems in processes, products or services. It helps teams identify inefficiencies and frequent errors and provides a framework for actionable, manageable changes.

Continuous improvement uses an incremental approach, meaning it focuses on ongoing efforts to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and quality through manageable changes. This method also relies on regularly measuring and evaluating opportunities for further improvement. Instituting regular review and many smaller changes over time can add up to significant results and prevent the process failures or collapses that all-encompassing overhauls can cause.

You need an effective framework to guide efforts when implementing continuous improvement. Lean Six Sigma is an effective choice that is popular across a range of industries, from manufacturing to finance and banking. It’s increasingly being applied to healthcare systems as an actionable way to improve care delivery, support better patient outcomes and reduce costs. These goals are especially critical as the sector increasingly moves toward a value-based care model that provides incentives for high-value care and penalizes providers who fall short.

Lean Six Sigma Principles and Methodologies

Lean Six Sigma is a combination of the Lean and Six Sigma methodologies. Lean focuses on eliminating waste to save time, space, materials and money. This methodology focuses on eight categories of waste, which are described according to the acronym “downtime”:

  • Defects refers to a product that is unusable due to flaws or other problems.
  • Overproduction occurs when too many things are produced before they are required.
  • Waiting refers to anything that delays processes.
  • Non-used talent indicates a failure to take full advantage of employees’ skills, knowledge and/or abilities.
  • Transportation involves excessive or needless movement of products, materials or people.
  • Inventory refers to unused or unsold products, or unneeded materials.
  • Motion is unnecessary or excessive human movement, such as having to go to a different floor or facility to gather equipment or finish tasks.
  • Extra-processing is redundant or unnecessary work that individuals do to complete a task.

Once these areas of waste have been identified, Six Sigma principles can be used to improve processes. The most common of these is the DMAIC method:

  • Define the problem.
  • Measure the scope of the issue by gathering data on each step of the process.
  • Analyze the data to determine the cause of the waste or obstacles.
  • Improve the process by introducing adjustments.
  • Control effectiveness over time with ongoing monitoring and documentation.

Lean Six Sigma provides unique tools and principles that guide the improvement process, making problem-solving more manageable by breaking it down into discrete steps. This is especially helpful in healthcare due to its many variables and complexities. Lean Six Sigma also supports employee engagement and innovation; this kind of process improvement requires employees’ input and places significant value on their experiences in order to identify organizational or clinical areas that need attention.

LSS Applications in Healthcare

There are vast opportunities for improvement in healthcare, from clearing administrative roadblocks to improving the delivery of care and patient outcomes. These are just a few examples of where healthcare systems can incorporate Lean Six Sigma to gain insights into where processes might be getting bogged down or redundant tasks are creating waste.

Administration

Paperwork and documentation for insurance claims, billing and reimbursement are notoriously labor-intensive. Applying Lean Six Sigma tools can reduce errors and delays by identifying bottlenecks, finding areas where paperwork can be minimized, exploring where technologies can speed up or automate redundant tasks and so on. As a whole, Lean Six Sigma reduces costs by avoiding errors and delays, and it also saves employees time that they can then spend on higher-value tasks, increasing their productivity.

Seeing what supplies are used most and least often can support better inventory management. Avoiding over-ordering or implementing “just-in-time” inventory helps to prevent waste, as medications and other items are less likely to go unused and expire. It also makes it easier to keep supply areas organized and accessible, shaving off the time it takes for healthcare workers to acquire what they need. There may be further opportunities to streamline the supply chain, preventing unnecessary transportation and storage.

Providers may also be able to increase patient volume and satisfaction by identifying and addressing factors that could help reduce patient wait times. For example, simpler and streamlined patient registration and discharge can speed up turnover without sacrificing quality of care.

Healthcare systems and networks can also explore the varying demand for different services and facilities. By investing the most into the most used areas of care, they can reduce costs in other areas and ensure that patients have access to the care they truly need.

Patient Care

Research has shown that about 400,000 patients in hospitals experience “preventable harm” and that around 200,000 patient deaths are caused by medical errors every year.

Healthcare systems can reduce these failures by collecting data regarding surgery procedures, hygiene protocols and medication administration to see where errors occur most often. Improved processes, better equipment and other adjustments can result in fewer surgical errors, hospital infections and medication mistakes. Improvements in these areas not only prevent unnecessary hospital readmission and reduce the need for additional treatment, but also save people’s lives.

Care coordination across multiple providers, something that is especially critical when a patient has one or more chronic or complex conditions, is another example of where providers can explore ways to reduce inefficiencies. Improved communication and monitoring can minimize redundant or unnecessary tests or procedures, prevent conflicting medication prescriptions and help patients better understand their treatment plan.

Lean Six Sigma Certification for Healthcare Success

As healthcare leaders face increasing pressure to be more cost-efficient and deliver higher quality care while hitting their revenue goals, they are looking for individuals who are able to identify areas for continuous improvement and implement successful solutions.

Getting certified in the Lean Six Sigma methodology gives you the tools and expertise to oversee and assist with a wide variety of process improvement projects. If you are interested in solving some of healthcare’s most pressing challenges, helping organizations provide better, more efficient care and positioning yourself as a leader who brings results, Lean Six Sigma can get you there.

Healthcare professionals can gain a competitive advantage by completing a high-quality Lean Six Sigma certification program that provides real-world skills and training. Many leadership roles in the healthcare industry can benefit from a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification or Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification. Green Belt holders are well-versed in LSS methodologies and can oversee some projects, or assist Six Sigma Black Belt holders, who are qualified to manage high-level projects.

At Purdue University, we also offer unique online Lean Principles and Green Belt Refresher course options. The Lean Principles course provides learners with a personalized toolkit for implementing Lean methodologies into their organizations, while the Green Belt Refresher prepares those with Green Belt certification to take the Black Belt course.

About Purdue’s Online Lean Six Sigma (LSS) Certificate Programs

Purdue University offers comprehensive, instructor-led online Lean Six Sigma (LSS) certificate programs designed for working professionals with varying levels of Lean Six Sigma experience. The online Lean Six Sigma certificate courses prepare professionals to satisfy the immense demand for Lean expertise, skills and certification.

Purdue offers the following courses 100% online:

Download a brochure to learn more about Purdue University’s online Lean Six Sigma programs, or get registered today.