Almost any short visit to your nearest hospital will leave you with the notion that something here can be done better. Waiting times abound even though many people seem to be doing nothing. Patients spend hours in a waiting room to get into the Emergency room....
Imagine you are a new Physician working in a group practice as part of an Academic Medical Center (AMC). You may be surprised to learn that you are soon expected to play a leading role in managing the day-to-day process flows of the clinic. This may sound strange...
At some point during the first session of our courses on Operations Management, Process Improvement, or Managing Health Care Processes we find the need to understand and utilize Little's Law. This refers to anobservation by John Little which states that the long-term...
Working at Johns Hopkins University in the Business and Medial schools over a decade or so resulted in a number of published works that you may use to develop understanding, and generate ideas about process improvement. We provide links to many of these works here for...
I once had a student in my course on Improving Healthcare Processes tell me that since they were pregnant they would look for a hospital that was not an Academic Medical Center (AMC) because, “Everyone knows that the AMC has to be less efficient.” I didn’t want to...
Among my varied adventures as an undergraduate student at Virginia tech was my time spent working in a small pizza restaurant. In the role, I was often assigned to come in before the restaurant opened and do “prep work.” This consisted of filling containers with...
In an appointment-based healthcare system congestion can easily be caused by patients arriving late. There is also the universally accepted idea that people don’t like waiting. With these factors in mind, we came up with a simple sounding idea. If patients have to sit...
In our work with Academic Medical Centers we have engaged in in-depth study of a number of offices, clinics, departments, hospitals, and insurance companies. Such an exploration involves data analysis on multiple levels. We always consider the financial reports...