Essay Sample on Lean Process Improvement at Cleveland Clinic

Introduction

Cleveland Clinic is one of the most widely known hospitals for the care it provides on cardiovascular issues. It was founded around 1921 by four physicians who had the feeling to innovate, compassion, and compassion. The clinic was lead by Cosgrove, who invented the saying that stated: "patients' first." They were more concerned about the patient's care and their aim was to direct the hospital's care system on the patient. They believed that the reason they had their job is that they had to take care of the patients.

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The clinic staff was more concerned about the patient's outcome and satisfaction that helped the clinic to operate smoothly. The clinic was negatively affected if the patient was dissatisfied, and if the clinic could improve these support functions, the overall efficiency of the hospital was affected positively. A performance and improve service team was established that brought leaders from different industries together. These leaders worked in partnership with the clinic staff to invent possible solutions that improve the quality of care and services of the patient.

Past the last years, nurses and physicians complained about the speed and accuracy of the surgical processing department. The process to begin a surgical procedure became difficult because of delays in surgical instruments. Patients would experience discomfort if there were delays in instrument distribution or if the surgical process was postponed. The clinic also experienced losses because delays caused by the surgical processing department if they delayed the instruments. Other losses resulted from the cancellation of the surgical procedure and patients' dissatisfaction. The surgical processing department realized the problems that were dragging them behind and they teamed up Stanicki to improvise improvements in the surgical sector.

Jin Leonard a member of Performance and Service improvement and Stanicki indentified the most common problems affecting the Surgical Processing Department. These problems were, missing instruments and instruments delays. After coming up with various strategies to deal with these problems, they decided that lean improvement efforts were the most appropriate to rectify the problems.

The team created a value stream map of the current state that identified the processes that were required to make sure the work being done by the Surgical Processing Department is completed. The map comprised of four sub-processes: Sterilization, Decontamination, Prep & pack, and case cart assembly and delivery. The carts used as the surgical instrument had bar codes which were scanned by electronic database which recorded the receipt of the card. The instruments were loaded into automated washers, and they go through the process of automatic cycle of washing and drying. The instruments would them be moved to the prep & pack stage.

Kaizen found out that most resources were being wasted through excess inventory, overproduction, and unnecessary transport. Patients were scheduled for magnetic resonance imaging, and injected with contrast agents that enabled the MRI results to be analyzed more quickly and easily. The MRI process was stopped by the technicians so that the patients would be injected with contrast, and this resulted in backups and scheduled headaches.

References

Agarwal, S., Gallo, J. J., Parashar, A., Agarwal, K. K., Ellis, S. G., Khot, U. N., ... & Kapadia, S. R. (2016). Impact of lean six sigma process improvement methodology on cardiac catheterization laboratory efficiency. Cardiovascular Revascularization Medicine, 17(2), 95-101.