Evaluating the Applicability and Sustainability of Lean Six Sigma Continuous Process Improvement Methodology to Improve Health Care Quality
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Date
2015-10-21
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
The health care industry has been using LSS for nearly two decades and evidence on effectiveness has been accumulating in the form of published peer reviewed journal articles. Although there have been reports of breakthrough improvements across a diverse set of industries, LSS is still considered a foreign quality improvement approach in health care and there is a lack of a comprehensive study on the applicability and effectiveness of the continuous process improvement approach as a robust enterprise QI solution.
Therefore, the body of work in this dissertation aims to provide a comprehensive study of how LSS has been used in health care, as well as a deeper analysis of whether the evidence that has been published in biomedical journals provides enough proof of its effectiveness. It also seeks to identify barriers preventing sustainable results in an effort to uncover factors that may provide information to health care professionals on whether to adopt this methodology.
In chapter 2, a systematic literature review is presented that investigates LSS articles that have been published in biomedical journals and provide examples of where this QI methodology has been successfully used. In Chapter 3, an evaluation of the quality of the LSS articles that have been published in peer reviewed journals is presented to understand whether health care professionals are able to use these reported results as evidence of LSS effectiveness in health care. In Chapter 4, an analysis to uncover key barriers to LSS project sustainability in health care is presented followed by recommendations on how to overcome them. Lastly, in Chapter 5, a conclusion to the dissertation is presented with a summary of the key findings from the thesis articles and provide an approach to help LSS programs in health care maximize their potential through an enterprise change acceleration methodology.
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Keywords
Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma, QI, Quality Improvement, Health, Healthcare, cost reduction, defect reduction, patient safety, healthcare transformation