Category: MBOE Healthcare
MBOE Sessions, Healthcare, Problem Solving, Leadership Development, MBOE, MBOE Healthcare, Lean thinking
When our Master of Business Operational Excellence health-care students spent some with Kathryn Correia, chief of Minnesota’s HealthEast Care System, she brought up a great point about the things that slow us down. Most of the interruptions that impede the flow of care, she said, aren’t surprises. If a machine breaks down, we know that somewhere we missed out on the preventive maintenance. If patients, providers or staffs are waiting for too long, we know that we have not really designed our processes to meet the demand.
MBOE Sessions, Toyota Production System, Healthcare, MBOE, MBOE Healthcare, Lean thinking, Operations
Last week, we hosted our industry and health-care MBOE cohorts on campus, bringing together dozens of professionals in a range of different fields. The principles and leadership skills we teach in each program carry many similarities, but there remain some key differences between health care and the rest of the pack. Shingo prize-winning author Jean Cunningham highlighted one of those when she visited our health-care cohort last week.
Our car was vandalized. We don’t know when it happened but we found it a couple of days ago. It was a shocking sight. The glass on the driver’s side of the window was broken and the shards were all over the seat and below. The center part of the dashboard was ripped apart and insides of the dashboard were hanging below. We do not know who did it and why they did it but the fact is that we felt violated. No one has the right to even touch let alone destroy what belongs to us.
Most of our MBOE students have now finished creating the value-stream maps that they can work with for their capstone projects, the culmination of our year-long program. The flow of information, one of the key components within a value stream, many times gets neglected. It is very important to indicate the flow on the map to highlight the intricacies and the challenges faced by the people who do work on a daily basis.
Value stream mapping has been widely used in the manufacturing industry to understand flow.