It is time "to re-engineer a health-care system"
drawing on "quality-control techniques common in other industries"
- Wall Street Journal, May30, 2002.

Hospital Process Improvement - What can hospitals learn from the manufacturing industry? In a Wall Street Journal article, Dr. Donald Berwick, a Harvard Medical School faculty member, questions the status quo and calls for hospital re-engineering using process improvement methods that the manufacturing industry has been using and perfecting over several decades.

Hospitals in the UK have been putting these healthcare process improvement practices into use since 1998 when the National Health Service decided to reduce patient waiting times for surgery and outpatient clinic visits.

Hospitals today are faced with multiple pressures:

Increasing patient loads
Increasing hospital operating costs
Shortage of qualified healthcare staff
Limited hospital facilities

What does manufacturing technology have to do with my hospital?

Over the last 30 years, manufacturers in the U. S. have had a similar experience. Their focus was on major cost cutting initiatives and the manufacturing industry went through wild swings of downsizing, rightsizing, reorganizations, etc. However, during this time, there have been many innovative process improvement techniques developed such as:

Total Quality Management (TQM)
Process Re-Engineering
Constraint Methodology
Lean Manufacturing
Six Sigma

As a result, many manufacturers are more focused on improving their overall throughput. The result is that they are able to identify pinch points that are limiting overall performance and develop strategies that exploit them for significantly improved revenues and profits.

These process improvement methodologies are particularly beneficial to hospitals because there are substantial fixed costs due to facility and equipment investments. In order to best prepare for future declines in Medicare and Medicaid revenues, hospitals should best utilize the intervening time to enhance their revenue stream and increase profits.