With reimbursement challenging revenue in already constrained budgets, laboratories are increasingly looking for financial stability through cost savings achieved with added operational efficiencies. For many laboratories committed to developing long-term strategies, rather than short-term fixes, lean engineering principles are successfully transforming operations. Lean, a management system first pioneered by Toyota Motor Corporation in the 1990s, is a production system based on the principles of continuous process improvement, elimination of waste, and worker engagement. Today the concept of lean is synonymous with identifying and removing waste from operations, while promoting value to the customer, explains Bohdan Oppenheim, Ph.D., a systems engineering professor at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles) and developer of the university’s graduate certificate program in Lean Healthcare Systems. Managers and directors from Kaiser Permanente Southern California have been participating in Loyola’s graduate certificate program and are bringing lessons learned to Kaiser’s Southern California regional laboratory, which performed 59.1 million tests in 2014. “We started to be intrigued in lean as an organization by its potential to increase quality and reliability and decrease costs,” Michael Kanter, M.D., regional medical director of quality and clinical analysis at Southern California Permanente Medical Group (SCPMG), tells DTET. “As we were considering pilots in […]