Technology Integration Performance Assessment Using Lean Principles in Health Care

Abstract

This study assesses the impact of an automated infusion system (AIS) integration at a positron emission tomography (PET) center based on "lean thinking" principles. The authors propose a systematic measurement system that evaluates improvement in terms of the "8 wastes." This adaptation to the health care context consisted of performance measurement before and after integration of AIS in terms of time, utilization of resources, amount of materials wasted/saved, system variability, distances traveled, and worker strain. The authors' observations indicate that AIS stands to be very effective in a busy PET department, such as the one in Moffitt Cancer Center, owing to its accuracy, pace, and reliability, especially after the necessary adjustments are made to reduce or eliminate the source of errors. This integration must be accompanied by a process reengineering exercise to realize the full potential of AIS in reducing waste and improving patient care and worker satisfaction.

Lean Healthcare Tools for Processes Evaluation: An Integrative Review

“…After the application of these tools, interventions were carried out by the authors, obtaining in several cases a reduction in the workload, length of stay, treatment, waiting and, consequently, a reduction in lead time. In contrast, a study found that after implementing changes, there was an increase in costs [47].…”

“…Among these interventions, we can highlight reorganization of the physical structure [19,30,39,41,45], review of work processes [38,[46][47][48][49], development and standardization of documents [29,[50][51][52][53] and team training [24,25,41,54,55], among others. A single article that aimed to evaluate the current process of a service did not present any type of intervention [22].…”

“…Three studies [39,47,59] are noteworthy as they present a reduction in the distance traveled by professionals as a result of their interventions. These three used the VSM tool and two of them combined them with the spaghetti diagram; from this, we can infer that the combination of these two tools contributes to a better use of the physical space of the health units.…”

“…The outcomes that stood out the most in the evidence were related to time, be it processing, waiting, cycle, permanence or total. Most studies showed improvement in these times, after the implementation of interventions based on the causes of waste previously mapped [21,23,25,29,31,32,38,42,[46][47][48][49][50]54,56,57,60].…”

State of research and future research tendencies in lean healthcare: a bibliometric analysis

“…D'Andreamatteo et al (2015 and Holden et al (2015) demand the investigation of national differences, while Andersen and Røvik (2015) ask for adaption of Lean Philosophy to the local context. A related topic is the investigation of Lean Healthcare's influence on healthcare employees and their engagement in Lean Implementations (Abdelhadi 2015;Holden et al 2015;Rico et al 2015).…”