Healthcare Case Study Part 4

This is my final posting in this series of posts which includes the final results of this team's efforts.

This team did an excellent job of analyzing this important process and was able to remove much of the waste contained within it. But the real improvement came in the overall potential time to complete this procedure, which should have a significantly positive impact on damage to patient’s heart muscles when their recommendations are implemented, and this was the overriding premise and objective of this event.  Figure 10 is the final future state map for the Door to Balloon time and as you can see, the number of steps in the process was dramatically reduced!

                                    Figure 10 Final Future State Map

The following is a summary of before and after for this PVSA. The highlighted numbers in Figure 11 represents a summary of the actual cycle time reduction for Door to Balloon time, as well as reductions in the number of decision points and total steps in this process, which was a total of 27 steps. Another key element of this effort was a 31% improvement in the number of value-added steps.

Figure 11 Improvement Results Summary

Although a reduction in Door to Balloon (D2B) time of 13 minutes might not seem like much of an improvement to some of you, you must consider how much less damage to a patient’s heart muscle might be avoided. In the healthcare field for procedures such as Door to Balloon time, every minute counts.  As you have just observed, by combining Lean and Six Sigma with the Theory of Constraints, significant improvements were realized.  This hospital used what they had learned in this study to also streamline their surgical unit and were able to perform much needed surgeries on many more patients.

In my next series of posts, I'll begin a new subject.  Hope you enjoyed this series!

Bob Sproull