The Power of Ideas to Transform Healthcare: Engaging Staff by Building Daily Lean Management Systems

Many companies conduct Lean training and projects, but few have tapped the wealth of ideas in the minds of their staff like Baylor Scott & White Health. This book documents the path Steve Hoeft and Robert Pryor created at Baylor Scott & White Health and shares what worked as well as what didn’t―illustrating over seven years of successes and failures in detail.

Providing easy-to-follow guidance for deploying Lean and TPS in healthcare, The Power of Ideas to Transform Healthcare focuses on what needs to be done and who needs to do it. It explains that the new "currency" for 2015 and beyond will be ideas―ideas brought out in projects, problem solving, and especially in "Huddles." The most significant concept in this book is not huddles. Instead it’s who builds the systems around them and why.

• Supplies the understanding required to build a Lean management system in any industry
• Explains how to align staff around common goals and cascade and translate those goals using Hoshin Kanri
• Demonstrates how daily Lean can reduce the cost of healthcare

The authors share hundreds of pictures, forms, tools, and tips. Describing how to engage all staff and draw out their ideas in daily huddles, the book offers ways that staff can try out their ideas without spending too much time away from their work.

Although the book focuses on healthcare, the management systems described, along with the lessons learned and best practices, will work in almost any industry.

Steve Hoeft, Robert W. Pryor MD