Leveraging Lean in Ancillary Hospital Services

This book is part of a series of titles that are a spin-off of the Shingo Prize-winning book Leveraging Lean in Healthcare: Transforming Your Enterprise into a High Quality Patient Care Delivery System. Each book in the series focuses on a specific aspect of healthcare that has demonstrated significant process and quality improvements after a Lean implementation. There are many departments within a hospital that support the primary function of caregiving and each can benefit from implementing Lean methodologies. Leveraging Lean in Ancillary Hospital Services: Creating a Cost Effective, Standardized, High Quality, Patient-Focused Operation provides a functional understanding of Lean processes and quality improvement techniques in nutritional services, inpatient floors, pharmacy, and radiology. This book is ideal for healthcare executives, leaders, process improvement team members, and inquisitive frontline workers who want to implement and leverage Lean. Supplying detailed descriptions of Lean tools and methodologies, it identifies powerful Lean solutions specific to the needs of ancillary hospital services. The first section provides an overview of Lean concepts, tools, methodologies, and applications. The second section focuses on the application of Lean in the ancillary hospital services environment. Presenting numerous examples, stories, case studies, and lessons learned, it examines the normal operation of each area in radiology, pharmacy, and nutritional services and highlights the areas where typical problems occur. The case studies walk readers through various Lean initiatives and demonstrate how Lean tools and concepts have been used to achieve lasting improvements to processes and quality of care. It also introduces actionable blueprints that readers can duplicate or modify for use in their own institutions. Illustrating leadership’s role in achieving departmental goals, this book will provide you with a well-rounded understanding of how Lean can be applied to achieve significant improvements throughout the entire continuum of care.