The need for implementing lean in healthcare organisations

For change to take place within a healthcare setting, hospital's administrators and practitioners will need to develop cognitive pathways in order to recognise the direct relationship between poor procedural systems and practitioners' reactionary measures. In this paper, we illustrate, by means of four case examples, how hospital administrators and practitioners should shift their efforts towards the implementation of a holistic approach such as lean methodology to develop, deploy and implement sustainable continuous improvement processes. The results of the case examples clearly illustrate that the benefit of such changes outweighs the burden currently placed on the US healthcare system.