Lean in Healthcare

Lean management principles have been used effectively in manufacturing companies for decades, particularly in Japan. ENGAGE believes that lean principles can be — and are already being — successfully applied to the delivery of health care.

Adding patient value

Lean thinking begins with driving out waste so that all work adds value and serves the patient's needs. Identifying value-added and non-value-added steps in every process is the beginning of the journey toward lean operations. With ENGAGE Modeler you easily switch between Valuestreams (VSM) and Lean-views that shows you exactly which steps adds value and which not.

Empowering staff

In order for lean principles to take root, all staff should be involved in helping to redesign processes to improve flow and reduce waste. The development of ENGAGE Modeler was especially geared towards that purpose: the ability to ENGAGE your people in the study and design of care paths in a very effective way.

Eliminating waste

Although health care differs in many ways from manufacturing, there are also surprising similarities. For example, whether you build a car or provide health care for a patient, employees must rely on multiple, complex processes to accomplish their tasks and provide value to the customer or patient. Waste — of money, time, supplies, or good will — decreases value.

How to apply ENGAGE Modeler?

ENGAGE method advises to interactively engage all experts and roles in a workshop to map and study an existing care path versus the desired and optimised care path. This way all activities, outcomes, and deviations from the regular care path are understood by all participants. Variables like processing time and lead times are calculated on the fly by our software to include in the process analysis. This way, teams can quickly study "what-if" scenarios and experiment with improvement options. By doing this interactively in workshops the team will reach new insights in their processes which is a healthy basis for the cooperation among the departments; the use of IT systems; and the certification of processes.

Working together with partners

We work with several highly acclaimed partners and consultants for process management or Lean-project collaborations, including CapGemini Healthcare consulting, IG&H, House of Performance and many specialised consultants. Additionally, we work together with a large number of companies that have specialized in IT-services. They include specialists in risk management, document workflow, financial support processes etc.