Determining Lean Practices in Health Care Service Systems
Health care industry is a rapidly growing sector in most countries in the world. Hospitals strive to find efficient approaches to improve their service operations. Lean management has been widely recognized from manufacturing and service organizations as
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Determining Lean Practices in Health Care Service Systems P. Punnakitikashem
Abstract Health care industry is a rapidly growing sector in most countries in the world. Hospitals strive to find efficient approaches to improve their service operations. Lean management has been widely recognized from manufacturing and service organizations as managerial philosophy to reduce wastes and increase values to customers. Recently, lean management was adopted in many health care organizations. To promote the success of lean implementation, it is crucial to understand the extent to which lean practices are implemented and their impacts in organizations. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to review lean management, lean practices, and their impact with respect to health care service system context. After reviewing literature, lean practices in health care, important service operations, were determined. In addition, this paper identifies five dimensions of operational performance in health care service organization. These five dimensions are speed, cost, productivity, quality, and customer satisfactions. For the next step of this research project, an empirical study investigating the relationship between lean practices and their impact on operational performance will be carried out. Keywords Healthcare • Hospitals • Lean thinking • Lean • Lean management
90.1 Introduction Health care is an important sector for every country as it involves health and well-being of population in the nation. The challenges of health care industry are from tremendously increasing cost and increased quality required from the patients. Many hospitals attempt to adopt innovative management concept with the aim to
P. Punnakitikashem () College of Management, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand e-mail: [email protected]; prattana [email protected] E. Qi et al. (eds.), The 19th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-37270-4 90, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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improve their service operations. Many quality initiatives concepts have diffused to the health care sector. By implementing such management concept efficiently and effectively would ultimately help in delivering the highest value to patients. This leads to questions related to ‘what’ and ‘how’ management practices should be implemented to improve the overall hospital performance. Lean management, originated from automotive industry, is one of the latest organizational innovations. Recently, many health care service organizations, ranging from those in developed countries, e.g., United Kingdom, the United States, Canada to emerging economies countries, e.g. Thailand, have adopted lean management to eliminate waste, thereby creating value of service delivered to the end customers. Thus, it is crucial that the organizations understand impact of practices of lean implementation to the hospital performance. Research which provides a greater understanding of the impact of lean implementation in h
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