Lean Enterprise Transformation and Enterprise Architecture of Health Care Systems

Session
Lean Six Sigma

Authors
Deborah Nightingale
Professor
MIT Lean Advancement Initiative

Jordan Peck
Ph.D. student
MIT Lean Advancement Initiative

Description
Over the course of many years of research with industry partners, the Lean Advancement Initiative has created effective tools and frameworks for the transformation and architecting of a Lean enterprise. This presentation will describe the research and show how the tools have been applied to healthcare.

Abstract
The U.S. healthcare delivery system is highly fragmented and comprised of multiple stakeholders that may not necessarily have aligned interests. In response to increasing costs and social pressures, practitioners have adopted methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma within delivery units. However, in order to truly begin resolving the healthcare system's problems, a holistic systems approach is required that addresses the fragmented nature of the healthcare industry. Localized lean may result in significant improvements, but in order to maximize the potential of such tools, holistic methods must be used to architect and align the delivery enterprise. For more than 15 years MIT's Lean Advancement Initiative (LAI) has been working with experts from industries including aerospace, automotive, electronics, health care, transportation, construction, defense acquisition and logistics, research labs and many others. This partnership has lead to the development of methods for holistically solving operational problems and advancing the science of Lean thinking and Enterprise Architecting. This talk will discuss the primary tools and methods developed at MIT's Lean Advancement Initiative for creating lean enterprises using holistic thinking and convey key insights drawn from some initial studies at Boston area hospitals.