Improve Outpatient Clinic Access and Service with Lean Six Sigma

Session
Lean/Six Sigma

Authors
Andrew Ganti
Master Black Belt, Lean Six Sigma
Workflow IT Solutions

Bill Manns
COO
Alameda County Medical Center

Description
Access time is several months and service time is over four hours for outpatients in many clinics of the Ambulatory Care Center of a teaching hospital. Two Lean Kaizens and change management tools rapidly improved the metrics by over 30% and sustained the gains generating momentum for institutionalizing the changes.

Abstract
Several clinics in an ambulatory care center at a teaching hospital had long wait times to get appointments and long throughput times in the clinics. This results in over 40% no show rate, loss of patient visits and low customer (Referring MDs and Patients) satisfaction scores.

Hospital administration authorized a project to apply rapid improvement tools to improve the access to and service in the clinics. Access and Service Kaizen teams represented by Registration, Scheduling and Clinic staff applied the Lean Six Sigma tools to improve processes in the Cardiac clinic. Planning Team will roll out the results to other 30 general and specialty clinics at the main campus and then to two other campuses serving the same community.

Solution development and try storming with acceptance and accountability produced over 30% improvements in two weeks. Dashboard helped to sustain the results. Management engineers, clinic administrators and other process improvement practitioners will take away Lean, Six Sigma and Change Management tools used, results achieved, governance structure for roll out, ways to deal with complexities of a teaching hospital serving inner city patients speaking 26 foreign languages and critical success factors to achieve similar results in their own settings.