Lean Six Sigma Can Help a Healthcare Organization

Healthcare organizations are tight on their budgets today because of so many people that lack insurance and the numbers of emergency room visits or hospital stays that go unpaid.  It can be hard for a hospital to remain open to the public, and lean Six Sigma can help to reduce costs so that the financial issues of our healthcare system are not such a burden.  When you send employees to Six Sigma courses, they learn how to spend money wisely and how to cut wasteful expenses that are not necessary for everyday operations. 

Processes can always be improved upon, especially in a hospital system.  Patient care is vital when it comes to running lab reports and tests for the doctors.  Many of these processes today are run by individuals at a computer.  Human error is a factor, and it can mean the life of a patient.  The great thing about Six Sigma training is that you will learn how to automate some of these critical processes.  Not only can this benefit a healthcare organization in minimizing human error but it can also cut down on labor costs as well.

Resources are often limited in healthcare organizations.  Lab equipment such as x-ray machines are extremely expensive, and if budget is tight, then departments often must go without.  This can slow down productivity and cause patients to have to wait.  Six Sigma online training courses offer helpful tools to show you ways that you can make the most use of resources and get the most productivity.  This might include repairing broken x-ray machines rather than buying new ones, or redesigning an entire patient floor to make things flow more smoothly. 

Healthcare organizations really need the ability to cut costs and lean Six Sigma training is the best option.  Six Sigma courses will teach employees and management ways to cut costs by eliminating wasteful processes, equipment, and other things that cause productivity to slow, affecting the patients in a negative way.  Six Sigma training will show a healthcare organization how they can begin saving money by automating processes also.  Not only will human error be minimized but better use of employee’s efforts can be managed.

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Design for Six Sigma Explained

Design for Six Sigma is designing to meet customer needs and process capability. That sounds rather complex, but in reality it is similar to the Six Sigma processes for continuous improvement, but starting with a clean slate rather than one that has defects. Design for Six Sigma is often broken down into the acronym of DMADV.

DMADV stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Verify. During the Define stage, the project goals and customer needs are clearly defined. This is the reason the project exists in the first place. During the Measure phase, evaluate customer expectations to ensure that the products live up the company’s reputation as well. The next phase is to Analyze, where current processes will be evaluated to see how they fit with the proposed project. The most active phase is probably the Design phase, where the actual process will be laid out in detail, and finally that process is Verified to ensure that it performs as expected.

Using the founding thought of “work smarter, not harder”, each phase of the DMADV cycle is completed and evaluated. If at any point a flaw is found or a defect detected, the cause needs to be figured out and fixed before moving on. It is more advantageous and less expensive to fix problems as they are discovered rather than waiting to fix the problems all at the end. Additionally, the problems may make the project impossible to complete if they are not addressed as they arise.

Placing the Design for Six Sigma into your product development tool kit gives your company one more tool to use when developing new products and services to better meet the needs of your customers. This method helps turn customer needs and expectations into critical requirements for the product/service, which are now built into the project and not thought of at the last minute. Also automatically built into the cycle is the minimization of costs over the project’s lifecycle, which includes materials, man-hours, and waste along with the design to make the process and its products as close to mistake proof as possible as the process is built, which avoids some costly defects before the plan is even put into motion.

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