Connecting the classroom to the "real world"
Lessons Learned in Manufacturing Applied to Healthcare
We spend time in class discussing lots of things in the setting of a manufacturing plant or business. There is always an asterisk that the same principles can be applied elsewhere such as in service industries or not-for-profit entities. Today I ran across a great piece that looks at how manufacturing knowledge has been applied to healthcare in Canada to cut down on wait times and to reduce costs.
A key inspiration came from an unexpected place: the shop floor. Health-care practitioners are borrowing techniques from manufacturers by streamlining operations and spinning off bits of their businesses as separate, specialized units. Clinics dedicated to one medical procedure are slowly but steadily emerging in Canada with a “focused factory” approach that produces better care for less money.
Inherent in the philosophy being promoted is a sense that incentives drive performance, which is something else we will look at in a couple weeks.
Health-care experts say the waiting-time strategy would never have succeeded without incentives for doctors to perform more surgeries. But the fee structure has not kept pace with technological advances that have dramatically reduced cataract surgery time. At Kensington, it takes 20 minutes on average to do a cataract surgery; the same procedure took an hour in the 1980s.
