December 1, 2016 by

LEAN on Me: How LEAN Initiatives Create Better Teams

CRTKL’s Rudy Santacroce discusses the LEAN process in design and healthcare.

Healthcare is changing, and one thing we can all agree on is that we need to optimize every dollar to assure it adds value. One of the most effective ways to do this is by eliminating waste. Seems simple enough, but how do we make it happen? The answer is: LEAN Initiatives.

LEAN solutions are more than just buzzword-heavy ideas. They can boost operational efficiency and eliminate waste in costs, time, errors, rework and more. With more than 37% of healthcare costs coming from waste, this process is so important in the design of healthcare facilities.

Rising costs, increased patient expectations and advancement of medical equipment can generate challenges to the way a healthcare system operates. Each healthcare facility has their own way of designing care delivery processes, and the constant changes in the industry make it difficult for these facilities to adapt. CallisonRTKL’s OPEX team develops integrated, viable strategies that drive positive patient outcomes by targeting operational and financial opportunities.

One such example was CallisonRTKL’s work with the Lankenau Medical Center. The center’s emergency department had a patient volume of 52,000 annual visits, exceeding its intended capacity by 30%. The emergency department was also challenged with quality, efficiency and patient safety issues. CallisonRTKL was engaged to help determine how best to optimize emergency department processes, utilize existing space and explore spatial needs to support future growth. The OPEX team performed data analytics, process improvement and predictive analytics/simulation services. LEAN process improvements were used to offer workflow solutions. The result was a reduced discharge time by 30 minutes and reduced admission time by 60 minutes.

Recently, our clients began to ask us how we had implemented LEAN into our own internal processes. We quickly realized that while we might be helping our clients improve their operations, we needed to implement our own ideas in our own offices. Therefore, we began an initiative that encouraged the entire healthcare practice group to embrace LEAN in order to improve our internal operations and, in turn, better serve our clients.

Incorporating LEAN will have many positive results for our healthcare practice group. This elimination of waste in our internal processes will result in the delivery of faster, better design solutions. We began this new chapter by value-stream mapping our design process, specifically focusing on our current state of operations. This allowed us to identify ways to eliminate waste and provide new opportunities for improvement. From that, we developed a new and innovative process that we are currently vetting and hope to implement in all of our projects moving forward.