Updated June 08, 2015.
From 2003 to 2012, the top-ranking concerns of healthcare CEOs has been financial challenges, followed by patient safety and quality of care, according to the American College of Healthcare Executives' (ACHE's) annual survey of issues confronting hospitals.
While many have adopted the 5S Lean mindset in their healthcare organizations, many more have yet to understand how they can realize the same return on investment that the manufacturing industry has shown.
If you're a healthcare leader needing to persuade your staff to make the effort and investment in the 5S Lean mindset, there are ways you can draw correlations from their investment to returns in finance, quality of care, and patient safety.
5S Lean, Defined
The 5S culture is a commitment to bring order to work, and reduce wastefulness found in operations and management. In healthcare this translates readily to organized storage of medical supplies, making them easily accessible by healthcare staff where and when they need them.
Sort: Separate the necessary high-use supplies from the unnecessary.
Set in Order: After supplies are separated and categorized, sort them in such a way that staff can quickly and easily find what they need. This often involves techniques such as color-coded labeling, and organized boundaries using shelves and bins.
Product ideas to help you "Set In Order":
- FrameWRX Modular Pharmacy Storage for Your Space and Efficiency Challenges
- Innovative Nurse Server and Patient Server Storage
Shine: Keep your storage space, and the environment of care, clean. Eliminating uncleanliness and contamination not only reduces the spread of infection, it can also impact patient satisfaction survey scores.
Product ideas to help you "Shine":
- Antimicrobial Copper Products for Medical Supplies and Equipment
- Value, efficiency, and infection prevention with pre-packaged procedure kits.
- Precautionary Tips to Avoid Seasonal Flu
Standardize: Create a standard that everyone understands and can follow so that there is a continuous process, a habit even, to routinely sort, set in order, and shine.
Read, A Tried and True Improvement Methodology for Healthcare Processes
Sustain: Perhaps the most challenging part of the 5S mindset, but when achieved, also the most rewarding. Employees committed to sustaining their efforts will feel restless when they find something out of order. Success at this stage means people will self-regulate the process and the order they have adopted.
Drawing Return On Investment From a 5S Lean Culture
Hospitals that operate with less waste are financially more profitable. However, there are numerous occurrences of human error (the primary source of waste in healthcare) every year in every facility. Rarely does waste, in the form of a medical error, get attributed to poor or improper training.
5S Lean brings order and organization to the natural chaos of healthcare, thus reducing the incidence of error. Waste and clutter have been proven to lead to human error in healthcare. Reduce waste, reduce clutter, and you reduce the incidence of human error. Correcting or treating the human error creates unplanned costs. These are the costs that create the financial challenges CEOs have been struggling with since 2003.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that in 2008, about 1 in 7 Medicare hospital patients were harmed from medical care. The financial tolls are obvious; if a hospital harms a patient, they must fix that situation. The fix becomes an unplanned expense. And when this happens to 1 in 7 Medicare patients, the rate of error is high and unsustainable for most hospital budgets over the long-term. To make matters even more taxing, Medicare reimbursements have been cut for care associated with hospital acquired conditions.
So the correlation between medical errors and hospital acquired conditions have a direct impact on financial results. A successful 5S Lean Healthcare culture, one where everyone on staff buys in to the need to continuously sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain, will clearly reduce the clutter and uncleanliness that causes human error in medical care.
As a result, not only do fewer medical errors or healthcare acquired conditions arise that strain the operational budget, quality of care improves (by definition of there being fewer errors), and patient safety increases in proportion as well. Better care is a sound investment.