Newsmaker Interview: Laura Winner

At the Center for Innovation you try to understand how healthcare can benefit from quality practices in other industries. How does that work?
When the Center was created in 2002, some people had dabbled with Lean Sigma methods in healthcare, but it hadn’t caught on. We wanted to see if people in healthcare were ready for Lean and Six Sigma to be applied to their processes. We got some early adopters to go through our Lean Sigma class and give us feedback. We eventually had to make the curriculum healthcare-specific. That made a tremendous difference in the adoption rate.

Does Lean Sigma work primarily in clinical areas or in the business office?
A lot of hospitals start in the business areas and go after the money. We chose to do things differently primarily because our overarching goal was improving the safety and quality of care that was delivered. Our approach was similar to GE – that if you improve the quality, the money will follow. We originally focused on safety and efficiency. As a result, we had some big financial improvements that were benefits from doing that. For instance, one of our groups was able to remedy a gap in their budget by increasing volumes of patients who were evaluated for, and received, renal transplants. We’ve also since gone after billing projects. Our CFO has become increasingly interested in how we might use Lean Sigma more broadly to reap the financial benefits.

How have you reached out to other organizations?
We teach our classes 3 or 4 times a year, and open it up to other organizations. We’ve had people from many different organizations. It’s starting to catch on, especially at the larger university hospitals and health systems that have multiple hospitals.

What are challenges to healthcare institutions in adopting these methods?
We think of our work as service, and that its much more variable, and so its different than industry. But without the benefit of Lean and Six Sigma methodologies to determine where waste is occurring, you really don’t have the information you need to free up the money that is currently wasted. And at least 40 percent of what we do in healthcare is waste.