Healthcare Value Leaders

A Partnership between the Lean Enterprise Institute and
the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value
May, 2009
Partnership Announcement

The Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) and the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value, two organizations with nearly 20 years combined experience in leading the development and implementation of lean thinking, have formed a partnership to fundamentally improve healthcare delivery by systematically identifying and eliminating waste while engaging all hospital employees and physicians in efforts that improve quality, cost, safety, and morale.
 
We are partnering because we believe proposed solutions to the country's healthcare problems, such as having electronic health records, more insurance coverage, or more advanced technology, while laudable, miss fixing the underlying problem -- healthcare's systemic waste and errors.
 
Systemic waste and errors in today's healthcare delivery drive down quality, drive up costs, and drive the acute problems that are all too common:
  • 100,000 unnecessary patient deaths annually.
  • 15,000,000 patient injuries annually.
  • 100,000,000 hospital medication errors annually.
  • Escalating costs that now stand at 16.2% of GDP, 50% higher than the next highest country.
We believe the solution to these and other problems is the application of lean thinking to processes delivering care in hospital rooms, clinics, operating rooms, pharmacies, emergency rooms, outpatient centers, etc. We feel that unless we eliminate the waste and errors first, any proposed reforms will only be different ways to pay for and perpetuate a broken system.
What We Will Do

We will advance this idea by engaging healthcare professionals in learning how to cut costs and improve quality by implementing lean thinking. We will:
  • Educate healthcare professionals in lean thinking.
  • Sponsor an annual conference for networking and sharing best practices and results.
  • Provide resources through our web site at www.healthcarevalueleaders.org.
  • Facilitate a learning network of healthcare organizations.
The principles and tools of lean thinking, applied successfully for decades by manufacturers, dramatically improved quality, cost, safety, morale, and delivery by systematically identifying and eliminating waste. Manufacturers that have diligently and thoroughly applied lean thinking principles have reaped annual productivity gains of 15%, 25%, and higher. 
 
Compared to traditional mass producers, lean organizations typically require half the human effort, half the manufacturing space and capital investment for a given amount of capacity, half the engineering hours to develop a new product in half the time, while making a wider variety of products at lower volumes with many fewer defects.
 
We ask you to imagine the results that similar improvements could bring in healthcare.
 
Already, the adaptation of lean methods in healthcare by pioneers such as ThedaCare, a four-hospital system in Appleton, WI, has proven to be remarkable and sustainable. ThedaCare began its continuous improvement journey in 2003 based on the Toyota Production System, the prototype lean system. Since 2006 ThedaCare has saved more than $27 million in productivity improvements without laying off any of its 5,500 employees.
 
Together, LEI and the Center represent a unique and powerful team that is well-positioned to leverage the latest lean knowledge. LEI brings 12 years of expertise in developing resources for companies on their lean journeys, while the Center brings six years of specific healthcare experience in creating a cultural transformation around lean thinking.
 
We will announce soon a series of practical steps for how we will reform the delivery side of healthcare.
About the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value

Created in 2008 by ThedaCare President/CEO Emeritus John Toussaint, MD, the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value is working to close the gap between value creation and marketplace reward. Its goal is to create a healthcare marketplace that rewards providers for delivering value measured in terms of optimized quality and cost for patients. The Center targets these issues by documenting innovative processes that reduce waste by transforming healthcare's current culture into one focused on continuous improvement. Dr. Toussaint served as president and chief executive officer of ThedaCare, Inc. from March 2000 until April 2008, and launched ThedaCare's lean transformation in 2003. For more information, visit the Center at http://www.createhealthcarevalue.com/
About the Lean Enterprise Institute

The Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc., was founded in 1997 by management expert James P. Womack, Ph.D., as a nonprofit research, education, publishing, and conferencing company with a mission to advance lean thinking around the world. We teach courses, hold management seminars, write and publish books and workbooks, and organize public and private conferences. We use the surplus revenues from these activities to conduct research projects and to support other lean initiatives such as the Lean Education Academic Network and the Lean Global Network. For more information visit LEI at http://www.lean.org.
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p.s. If you and your organization are interested in lean healthcare workshops, visit our Training & Education page for a list of workshops run by the Lean Enterprise Institute. There are healthcare-specific workshops as well as general lean management and problem solving workshops for methods that are applicable to any industry.