We mentioned that the lean philosophy calls for value creation through elimination of waste. These wastes are common in all industries and are not unique to healthcare. The following is a summary of these wasteful activities:
Recipes for implementation and lessons learned from failures have been reported; the common threads of these were that organizations need to change at a behavioral and cultural level and this should be translated directly into an endless process of continuous improvement. Despite these being framed in the realm of tangible strategic business direction, “cultural changes” and “endless improvement” are abstract concepts; furthermore, these principles imply that there is no horizon for successfully completing the task because the improvement process is infinite.
In healthcare, as in numerous other industries, lean management is gathering increasing momentum. In a 2013 article for the National Center for Biotechnology Information titled Lean Management—The Journey from Toyota to Healthcare (©2013 Teich and Faddoul), Sorin T. Teich, D.M.D., M.B.A., and Fady F. Faddoul, D.M.D., M.Sc. provided a comprehensive overview of what lean management is, and how its principles can be applied to the healthcare industry: