Lean Health Care Certification Overview

Progressive health care providers now realize the tremendous benefits of applying lean systems management to improve the effectiveness of health care delivery. The lean system allows the scrupulous organization of care-giving operations to focus on value delivery, providing high-quality, patient-centered care at low cost. It simplifies and builds strong control into health care operations to enable the highest standards of patient safety and quality of care; smooth work, information, and patient flows; and effective facility utilization. Through special organizational structures and embedded management practices it builds a culture of continuous improvement, creating a fully-engaged, intellectually contributing work force committed to making the care-giving processes they support more effective.

Although there has been interest in lean health care for a number of years, there is strong evidence that to date most applications have been narrowly focused on transplanting lean tools from manufacturing environments, e.g., copying standardized work practices for the execution of treatment procedures, or bringing rapid changeover protocols to an operating room. Such imitative implementations fall far short of the benefits that can be realized when the lean model is adopted as a native model by the total organization, truly transforming care-giving operations, at the systems level, into lean care-delivery value streams. It is this total system perspective, focused specifically on the unique needs of health care delivery, that makes ILS educational and transformation assistance programs unique and highly effective.

Our program is designed for all the key players involved in operations transformation, from your frontline clinicians and supervisors to your organization’s operational excellence leaders. To earn Certification, every candidate is required to complete examinations and major transformation projects with support from their leadership. These projects generally return the investment in this education many times over. Our courses provide rich, practical learning in a fully integrated program validated by research in many disciplines. They are designed for highly effective adult learning, integrating hands-on exercises, simulations, and realistic case studies every step of the way.

We conduct this program at public venues and on-site at your facilities. To maximize the impact on you organizations, we recommend that the training be conducted as part of our Lean Health Care Transformation Program, where we integrate the education with strategic action. This program builds strong internal lean capabilities in your organization while your people directly transform important value streams. We also recommend that your organization conduct our Lean Health Care Executive Excellence Diploma program to enable your leadership team to establish the understanding, support, and strategy for conducting lean transformation. Curricula for these programs are given in the links below.

• Lean Health Care Executive Excellence Diploma
• Certification Course 1. Lean Health Care Operations and Basic Tools
• Certification Course 2. Developing People in the Lean Heath Care System (5-days)
• Certification Course 3. Value Stream Design for Lean Health Care Systems (4-days)