'If You're Not Keeping Score, You're Just Practicing': A Lean Health Care Program Evaluation Framework

Abstract

Objective: To provide a rigorous framework for evaluating a Lean health care program based on an approach developed to evaluate the Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) Lean initiative.

Design: Data for analysis includes performance metrics for Lean activities, system level performance measures, staff interviews and longitudinal surveys and inputs.

Result: This paper describes the essential components of a Lean evaluation including short and long term efficiency gains, quality and safety improvements, staff engagement, resources and financial inputs.

Conclusions: The proposed evaluation framework for Lean interventions, based on a rigorous statistical foundation, considers key performance measurement dimensions and can be widely applied. It addresses a major failure of Lean programs; the lack of formal evaluation.

Keywords: Lean, evaluation, health care, performance metrics, operations management, six sigma