I was listening to some podcasts on guidonps.com. The speaker is Ron Wince, CEO of Guidon Performance Solutions. Some worthwhile nuggets from what I heard.
It seems everyone in healthcare is jumping on to LSS bandwagon, but mostly it has been used as a tactical toolbox until now. Off late people are realizing that they need to learn to do it well. LSS seems to be the bridge to bring about the socio-technical change. Hospitals are under pressure for a long time for reimbursement, cost and revenue realization. Health reform is driving this urgency. Key drivers pushing LSS adoption are (http://www.ache.org/pubs/research/ceoissues.cfm)
# Changes in revenue model from inpatient to outpatient
# Reimbursement rates going down
# Transparency issues
# Consumer education
# EMR adoption(financial incentives at risk)
It seems that current health reform will call for a management/financial reform.
Continuous Improvement seems to be something we must do everyday, but not everyone is mature enough to think that way. CI is about making the jump up from the last achieved level. Voice of the customer is the only guide to CI initiative. It is not uncommon to see that CI being a knee jerk response to a crisis. LSS is a combination of process refinement and leadership committment to work ON the business and not merely work IN the business. Is measurement an obsession or do we need a balance between results and KPI. Typically only 5% of the work done by an organization is value adding from a customer point of view !!!!!!!!!. 50% of the non value added activity can really be rid of immediately (it is neither regulotory nor compliance).
The IT footprint (human resources) in the healthcare providers is low and there will be a strong need for contracted IT. The health IT companies are likely to do well in the coming times. It is likely to take anywhere between 10 to 20 years before the healhcare bill to be implemented.
