Lean Archives:
How do we get patients to ask more questions?
While doctors often take pride in how open they are to patient questions, our self assessment doesn’t match up very well with empirical evidence. A recent post (http://bit.ly/c47tHj)summarizes a small study that is relatively terrifying to me – the take home is that doctors spend very little time explaining their recommendations, and that patients rarely [...]
Live from Panel Status RPIW
I’m writing live from the cross-functional RPIW to improve our panel status and update process. Team members–front line staff and leaders– from Customer Service, Primary Care Appointing Center, Finance, and four Primary Care clinics are here getting deeply immersed in the current state. They are looking at a variety of cross-functional processes that affect our patients and [...]
Evolution of a Tier 1 Board
I would like to share an enlightening experience I had one recent morning on Workplace Rounds with our Primary Care leadership at Burien. We spent about an hour in good discussion about the state of our clinic as represented graphically on our clinic level (tier 2) data board. These talks are always lively and, though [...]
Behind the Scenes: Planning for the Outreach RPIW
It’s Sunday and I am spending my afternoon doing odds and ends in preparation for tomorrow’s Rapid Process Improvement Workshop in Factoria-practicing my teaching module, double checking the detailed facilitator agenda to make sure I know where I am supposed to be and when I’m supposed to be there, re-thinking my questions for visioning. My [...]
Red Flag/Green Flag, sharing LEAN
Blogging live from the Primary Care Forum Linda Boatman and her team are incredibly creative. Their process involved large red and green flags…oh my! Actually, it really was a great way for the medical centers to share and learn how others are using Lean for problem solving. So, imagine Jon Lowe, chief at Redmond, holding [...]
All "a-Twitter" about Group Health
The medical home concept blows up the idea of the in-person visit as the “coin of the realm”. There is great value for our patients when we can meet their needs without them having to leave their lives, travel to the clinic, see us in person, and then travel back to what they would rather [...]
Are we there yet?
I had the privilege to be on the Management Guidance Team for the “Prepared for Visit” RPIW at Factoria last week. It was an overwhelming success by many different measures. I want to share some thoughts I had about the content, the process, and the people involved, but before I do let me set some context. [...]
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