Healthcare providers are typically driven to continually improve. Frontline workers deal daily with the consequences of inefficiencies and waste in the system. Personally, my family members in Healthcare are always talking about "if we just did it this way then everything would run a lot better." Why not let them make those improvements? Some institutions do. One process that does this is a ...

On March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747s collided killing 583 on a runway in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco. This accident led to a new era of standardization and safety in aviation. Aviation studied its vulnerabilities and innovated to be a much safer form of transportation with .07 deaths per billion passenger miles, reducing the number of commercial fatalities from the ...

Healthcare and auto manufacturing may not appear to have a lot in common, but healthcare is experimenting with Lean, an organizational methodology that comes from the auto industry. Since patients aren't cars and doctors aren't robots, how is this going to work in healthcare? Does it belong in healthcare? Why consider it at all?

Changes to regulations in the last decade, such as HIPAA and ...

Is organizational transparency possible in healthcare? The very nature of healthcare includes private, personal information. Does this prevent healthcare organizations from having a culture of transparency? What are the benefits of being transparent and why don't more institutions strive for transparency?

Medicine is based on trust. Patients trust that a doctor is going to take care of ...

A recent report in the Annals of Medicine provided an estimate of the institutional cost of physician burnout. The researchers used mathematical data from other recent studies to come up with the conservatively estimated total annual cost of $4.6 billion or $7600 per physician. The ...