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Abstract
The complexity of hospital operations and the ongoing need to ensure safe and high-quality patient care continues to present challenges for hospital managers and administrators. Kaizen events (KEs) offer opportunities to address some of the ongoing challenges in managing performance within a complex hospital environment. Kaizen events - a type of improvement project - have been utilized in healthcare as a mechanism to apply improvement tools to reduce waste, reduce non-value-added activity, and improve quality of patient care. A Kaizen event is a focused and structured improvement project utilizing a dedicated cross-functional team to address a targeted process or work area with specific improvement objectives in an accelerated timeframe. A critical issue for hospital is understanding the key factors that support and ensure the effective use of KEs in hospital settings to achieve the outcomes and benefits that impact both operations and the stakeholders of care. A preliminary assessment of a systematic literature review - a rigorous research method that evaluates and synthesizes the literature - was used to answer the primary research question: What are the main success factors of Kaizen events in hospital settings? Qualitative analysis was performed to extract, synthesize, and characterize the most frequently-reported success factors for KEs. Additional analyses were conducted to assess the strength of association between factors. This synthesis of knowledge is useful for practitioners for increasing understanding and improving the effectiveness and success of KEs in hospitals.
Keywords
Kaizen Events, Hospitals, Continuous Improvement, Success Factors
Introduction
Healthcare operations can be adversely affected by a multitude of problems that can undermine patient care delivery. The need to address ongoing challenges in a timely and efficient manner remains crucial. Hospital leaders must be proactive and responsive to mitigate the burden of complexity and compartmentalization. Management must continuously pursue Healthcare Continuous Improvement (HCI) to minimize problems or deficiencies that can negatively impact operations and the quality of care that patients receive. Inspired by the application of Kaizen events (KEs) in other sectors, such as manufacturing and service industries, KEs have been more recently utilized within healthcare to bring about meaningful changes (Holden & Hackbart, 2012). Kaizen events have been successfully applied to healthcare operations as a continuous improvement mechanism (Sankoff et al., 2013; Cowen & Joseph, 2016). Due...