An Overview of the Improvement Initiative Described
The article “Using Lean Six Sigma to Reduce Patient Cycle Time in a Nonprofit Community Clinic” was published by Kovach and Ingle in 2019. The authors explore how a nonprofit clinic in Houston, Texas, improved its clinic visit processes using Lean Six Sigma. In the article, the researchers reveal how healthcare organizations can utilize Lean Six Sigma tools to optimize critical processes like patient wait time and patient flow.
The Six Sigma methodology is widely known for its structured approach to process improvement. For instance, the clinic in this research succeeded by using the Lean Six Sigma tools: define, measure, analyze, improve, and control (DMAIC) to enhance its patient cycle time after exhausting its resourcefulness. In particular, the clinic refined its patient cycle time by reducing it from 68 to 53 minutes. The research demonstrates how healthcare organizations can utilize structured approaches like the Lean Six Sigma methodology to upgrade their process performances with limited data.
An Overview of the Lean Six Sigma Methodology That Guided This Improvement Initiative
To implement the clinic’s initiative of improving the patient cycle, the project team led by the clinical manager used the DMAIC approach. In the Define phase, the manager identified the clinic’s core problem, appointed members to steer the project, and defined the project’s mission. The manager identified a five-member team that included the clinic’s executive director, medical assistants, and healthcare providers (Kovach & Ingle, 2017). The team worked together to create a project charter outlining various duties to be performed by each project member.
The next phase, followed by the clinical manager, is the Measure phase. In this phase, the project team performed in-depth interviews with the clinic’s staff to document the current process. The team also regularly visited the clinic, and the key staff was shadowed while doing these investigations. The information obtained during this phase was chronologically in a 10-page cross-functional flowchart (Kovach & Ingle, 2017). Due to a challenge with measuring sub-process cycle times, the team used failure models and effective analysis (FMEA) to analyze and identify potential failures in the clinic’s process. The team found that different appointment durations and methods of collecting patient signs contributed to time wastage at the clinic. These were the major concerns of the project team that had the potential to affect the quality of the clinic’s services.
To develop the solutions to the identified challenges above, the project team held several brainstorming sessions with medical assistants and healthcare providers. The professionals agreed that to improve the clinic’s patient cycle, they had to standardize the duration of their patient appointments to 15 minutes. The team also decided to delegate the role of collecting patient signs to a senior medical assistant who collected the details effectively and accurately.
In the last phase, which is the Control phase, the team decided to update the clinic’s process map with the new changes. To measure the effectiveness of the project after implementation, the team relied on data for two months (May and June). The results revealed the project achieved its goal of reducing patient cycle time to under 54 minutes.
A Brief Description of the Finding Analysis
The research findings revealed that the Six Sigma Lean Methodology helped the clinic to upgrade its visit process successfully. Unlike other tools for improving performance, the logical nature of DMAIC makes it easy and accurate to identify errors and work on them on time, just like how the team in the research improved its patient cycle team. Structured approaches are the best in improving the process performances of complex healthcare organizations like nonprofit clinics. When these processes are used effectively and accurately, they yield impressive outcomes, just like the Six Sigma Lean methodology. Unlike other methods of improving process performance, I recommend the DMAIC approach since it can be applied with limited data.
Reference
Kovach, J. V., & Ingle, D. (2019). Using lean six sigma to reduce patient cycle time in a nonprofit community clinic. Quality Management in Healthcare, 28(3), 169-175. Web.
