This course includes some important issues such as Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management which lays out an integrated approach for using three improvement methods that have proven to be the most effective way to transform hospital operations in terms of patient outcomes and experience, financial viability, and employee satisfaction.

This comprehensive course presents a strategy for managing bottlenecks, eliminating waste, reducing errors, and containing costs in healthcare organizations, as well as sustaining the gains achieved. Real-world case studies illustrate successful performance improvement implementations that have realized breakthrough operational and financial results.

On completion of this course you should be able to:

• Assess the organization's readiness for adopting a best-of-breed performance improvement strategy.
• Deploy an integrated performance improvement program and get far better results than with traditional methods
• Use Constraints Management to identify leverage points and break constraints that exist in all healthcare organizations
• Build a program that consistently meets milestones on time and on budget.
• Illustrate how to begin thinking at the system-level of complex healthcare organizations and target high-impact opportunities.
• Know how to prevent common issues with sustaining improvement initiatives.

Performance Improvement in Healthcare

• These Are the Best of Times, These Are the Worst of Times
• What Is the Answer?
• It’s All About . . . the Patient . . . the Money—Why Not Both?
• The History of Performance Improvement in Healthcare
• Complementary (Core) Methodologies
• Three Windows: Constraints Management, Lean, and Six Sigma
• Conclusion

Constraints Management Applications in Healthcare

• The Evolution of Constraints Management
• Early Applications
• Constraints Management Terminology for Healthcare Systems Thinking
• The Goal
• Throughput
• Constraints
• The Five Focusing Steps
• Applications of Constraints Management
• Thinking Processes
• Buffer Management and Supply-Chain Logistics
• Critical Chain Project Management
• Finance and Measures

An Integrated Approach to Deploying Performance Improvement

• Who Leads the Performance-Improvement Deployment?
• Performance-Improvement Program Management Office
• Prioritization
• Deployment Team
• What Does a Mature Hospital Performance- Improvement Deployment Look Like?
• Governance
• Staffing
• Finance
• Visibility
• Non-delegable Responsibilities of Leadership
• Burning Platform
• Transactional versus Transformational Leadership
• Leadership Coaching
• Managing Upward
• What Is a Robust Deployment Approach?
• Four-Phase Integrated Performance-Improvement Approach
• Assess
• Plan
• Apply
• Sustain

Assessment

• Strategic Gap Analysis
• Performance-Improvement Maturity Assessment
• Change-Readiness Assessment
• Organizational Performance Review
• System-Level Value-Stream Analysis
• Initiating the SystemVSA
• SystemVSA Outputs
• System Constraint Analysis
• Intermediate Objectives (IO) Map
• Focused Current Reality Tree (fCRT)
• Identify System Constraint

Planning for Deployment

• Why Plan?
• Timeline
• Deployment Metrics
• Governance
• Who Are Performance-Improvement Practitioners?
• Lean
• Six Sigma
• Constraints Management
• Advanced Practitioners
• What Do Advanced Practitioners Do?
• Where Do Advanced Practitioners Come From?
• Practitioner Selection
• Practitioner Development
• Mentoring: An Art and a Science
• Mentoring Drives Results
• Practitioner Utilization
• Deployment Communications
• Communication Plan
• Communications Planning Summary
• Project Selection
• Project Sources
• Constraints
• Strategic Imperatives Identified by Leadership
• Project Prioritization
• First Projects
• Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) for Performance-Improvement Project Portfolios

Application of the Right Tool to the Right Problem

• Project Chartering and Execution
• Project Chartering
• Improvement Approach Selection
• Process-Level Value Stream Analysis
• Pre-event
• Event
• Post-event
• Quick Hits
• Rapid Improvement Workshops
• Pre-event
• Event
• Post-event
• Six Sigma Project
• Apply the DMAIC Methodology
• Reporting, Project Review, and Approval Process
• Reporting
• Project Reviews
• Approval Process
• Balanced Scorecard
• Generating Innovative Solutions
• Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ)

Sustainment

• Organic Capability
• Program Oversight
• Succession Planning
• Mentoring Revisited
• Training
• Integrated Change Management
• Barriers to Change
• Success Factors
• Change-Management Tools and Methods
• Benefits and Return-on-Investment (ROI) Validation
• Deployment Planning for ROI
• Role of the CFO
• Common Failure Modes
• Replication
• Taking Performance Improvement to the Next Level
• Introducing Constraints Management into Lean and Six Sigma Cultures
• How To Retool Performance-Improvement Programs