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Abstract
The cost of medical care has been increasing at an alarming rate; thus, it is imperative to apply Lean Six Sigma philosophy to gain operational control of a hospital while simultaneously maintaining a high level of service quality. The proposed study concentrates on the concepts of Lean Six Sigma, the integrated Lean Six Sigma framework, and the strategic approach to process innovation to decrease hospital operational costs, streamline the process, and eliminate waste, which consequently improves healthcare quality and patient satisfaction. The study first synthesizes Lean and Six Sigma, and then examines successful Lean Six Sigma practice. As the result of the study, we present the key elements of Lean Six Sigma approach, organizational infrastructure of Lean and Six Sigma, and insights on implementation and deployment of Lean Six Sigma practice to provide an alternative to healthcare for better service and greater efficiency with less cost.
Keywords
Lean, Six Sigma, healthcare, cost reduction
1. Background
Quality healthcare has become a worldwide goal. Growing evidence demonstrates that United States healthcare delivery system falls short of care that is safe, effective, efficient, patient centered, timely, and equitable. Furthermore, healthcare costs have been rising for several years. Expenditures in the United States on healthcare surpassed $2.3 trillion in 2008, more than three times the $714 billion spent in 1990, and over eight times the $253 billion spent in 1980 [1]. Given the current economic climate, the government has become increasingly intent on actualizing the value in the healthcare system and looks for ways that can contain or reduce public healthcare spending while simultaneously assuring the quality of service. Lean and Six Sigma have been widely applied in industry for many years in the pursuit of continuous improvement in operations. Lean focuses on removing non-value added work and improving process efficiency. Six Sigma, on the other hand, is designed to reduce variation of processes and measure how much a process varies from perfection [2]. Indicated by economic history, Lean and Six Sigma are two popular process innovation approaches that have achieved high levels of operational efficiency and cost reduction [3-5]. Both provide a systematic approach to facilitate incremental process innovations and improvements. Lean and Six Sigma have gone through parallel developments in recent years. Both approaches are...