By trade · Healthcare and life sciences
Lean Six Sigma in healthcare and medical devices
Healthcare combines two constraints few sectors share: a regulatory requirement that forbids changing a process without documenting it, and input variation nobody controls — a patient is not a part, and two files identical on paper do not require the same work. That is what makes shortcuts imported from series production fail.
Gains rarely come from speeding up care itself, which is seldom the bottleneck, but from the waiting between steps: patient transport, lab results, pharmaceutical sign-off, room availability. The delay the patient experiences is almost entirely made of those gaps, which service indicators do not measure.
The tools illustrated by a case from this sector
11 entries reviewed in English — 11 entries in all on the French page.
Continuous improvement
Kaizen is continuous improvement in small steps, led by those who do the work, as opposed to breakthroughs driven from outside.
Method · case: Healthcare
Lean house (TPS house)
The Lean house represents the Toyota Production System as a building: a foundation of stability, two pillars — just-in-time and jidoka — and a roof that carries the objectives.
Method · case: Pharmaceutical industry
Gemba / genchi genbutsu
The gemba is the place where the work is actually done, and the gemba walk is the practice of going there to observe the process rather than reading the report about it.
Method · case: Healthcare
PDCA / Plan-Do-Check-Act
PDCA is the four-step improvement cycle — plan, do, check, act — whose value lies in its last two steps, almost always skipped.
Method · case: Pharmaceutical industry
DFSS — design for Six Sigma
DFSS applies the Six Sigma logic to design, when there is no process yet to improve. It aims to create a product or service that is robust from the outset, rather than correcting afterwards.
Method · case: Medical devices
Process flow analysis
Process flow analysis records, in order, every step a product or a file goes through, classifying it by nature — operation, transport, inspection, delay, storage — to bring out what contributes nothing.
Lean tools · case: Hospital — patient pathway
RACI matrix
RACI is a table that assigns, for each activity, four distinct roles: who does the work, who answers for the result, who is consulted before, who is informed after.
Method · case: Pharmaceutical industry
Voice of the customer
The voice of the customer is the set of expectations expressed by those the process serves, collected in their words before being translated into measurable characteristics.
Method · case: Health insurance
Cycle time
Cycle time is the duration between two successive outputs of the same station or the same process. It describes a rate, is recorded with a stopwatch, and is never summed up by its mean.
Measurement and indicators · case: Medical device manufacturing
Muri and mura
Muri is the overburden imposed on people and equipment; mura is the unevenness of the load over time. They are the two causes that produce the waste one is about to fight.
Lean tools · case: Testing laboratory
Spaghetti diagram
The spaghetti diagram traces on a floor plan the actual movements of a person, a document or a part. The tangle obtained makes visible a distance nobody was counting.
Lean tools · case: Hospital pharmacy
Practise
The training corpus is not split by sector: the questions are about the tools, which are the same everywhere, and the certifications do not split their exams by sector either. To find your level, the shortest way is a fifteen-question quiz, no account needed:
The other trades: Lean Six Sigma by sector.