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Abstract
Lean Six Sigma is being applied increasingly in health care quality improvement efforts that focus on a defined problem within an organization. Another program many health care organizations are using to evaluate their overall performance and organizational processes is the Malcolm Baldrige criteria. One of the evaluation tools used by Baldrige examiners is called ADLI, which is an acronym for approach, deployment, learning, and integration. Applying the ADLI evaluation tool as a checklist at the conclusion of projects may help maintenance of the improvement, and these items are often overlooked by health care organizations at the conclusion of a project. Applying learning and integration as a formal check-list approach ensures a systematic method to maximize the likelihood of sustained improved performance from QI projects. Additionally, integration of process changes into the organization makes significant declines back to baseline performance less likely. Lastly, a well-defined control plan allows the organization to quickly and easily address slips in organizational performance for the controlled project.