Toyota-ism vs Taylorism

By MARK GRABAN If you’re new to the idea of “Lean,” I invite you to download and read chapter 1 of my book Lean Hospitals. Hat tip to Suresh for pointing me toward this article that was just published January 14th in the New England Journal of Medicine: “Medical Taylorism“ NEJM is the same journal that published Dr. Don Berwick’s article about Kaizen and Dr. Deming in 1989, how those concepts would be helpful in healthcare. Dr. Berwick realizes, as he talks about in that article, that not all factories are the same. Some are managed better than others. Employees are treated better in the “Lean” factories. Berwick was right to point out that medicine can learn from other industries… but that doesn’t turn the hospital into an assembly line. In the article posted this week, Pamela Hartzband, M.D., and Jerome Groopman, M.D. (the later the author of the popular book How Doctors Think), rant about all sorts of things… some of which have nothing to do with Lean. “Advocates lecture clinicians about Toyota’s “Lean” practices, arguing that patient care should follow standardized systems like those deployed in manufacturing automobiles. Colleagues have told us, for example, that managers with stopwatches have been placed in their clinics and emergency departments to measure the duration of patient visits. Their aim is to determine the optimal time for patient-doctor interactions so that they can be standardized.” This is wrong headed and insulting t...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs