Imagine a World Without Healthcare Disparities
It is easy to talk about the disparities in healthcare, but making progress against the current of complex social issues that are at the root of the differences in care experience and outcomes between populations has proven to be very hard. We have preferred “military...
Leadership: More Than A Position, An Activity
“Standard work” for leaders includes being involved and practicing a style of management that includes coaching, mentoring and teaching rather than just commanding, expecting, and holding accountable the people who do the work. John Toussaint has postulated that...
“Speak Truth To Power”: Engaging Leadership in Lean Transformation
Lean gets started in different ways, but for it to survive and thrive and move from being used as a set of tools to being the core of a culture and operating system that is the source of sustained excellence, eventually the CEO and senior management must lead. One...
Relational Contracts and Lean
I believe that without the total commitment of senior leadership, especially the CEO, Lean can’t succeed. Leadership can launch Lean or leadership can tolerate Lean and enjoy the benefits that it offers for a while, but if leadership wants Lean to be a sustainable...
A Lean Tour: Step 1, Management’s Willingness to Be Transformed
Lean is my favorite flavor of continuous improvement. I see Lean to be a term like “jazz” that defines an evolving philosophy that thrives on innovation. Lean is to continuous improvement as jazz is to music. Jazz is a continuously evolving art form that allows...
What do the primaries mean for health care’s future?
From the get go the pundits have been puzzled by this year’s Presidential primaries season. The confusion goes back to last June when Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the office of President. At first, the predictions were that Trump’s candidacy was a...
Concierge Medicine: Still Not a Good Idea
A few physicians in my community began to try concierge medicine in the mid nineties. My first reaction was, “Harley Street has come to Beacon Street”. If you watch Downton Abbey, Lady Mary Crawley probably took her maid, Anna Bates, to Harley Street when they went to...
Looking Forward with the Triple Aim
It is surprising that we have no good metrics to track our progress toward the Triple Aim. We have lagging numbers on what we spend as a nation and debatable public health indicators of gross population metrics. No one knows how many healthcare organizations have...
Leaping Barriers to the Triple Aim
In “The Triple Aim: Care, Health, And Costs” Berwick, Nolan and Whittington describe American healthcare as the most fragmented, most expensive and least effective care delivery system among all of the advanced economies of the world, and they identify the barriers...Case Study – Elizabeth Mcarthy
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