Description
Part case study, part manifesto, this groundbreaking new book by a doctor and a healthcare executive uses real-life anecdotes and the logic of lean thinking to make a convincing argument that a revolutionary new kind of healthcare — lean healthcare — is urgently needed and eminently doable.
In On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry John Toussaint, MD, former CEO of ThedaCare, and Roger A. Gerard, PhD, its chief learning officer, candidly describe the triumphs and stumbles of a seven-year journey to lean healthcare, an effort that continues today and that has slashed medical errors, improved patient outcomes, raised staff morale, and saved $27 million dollars in costs without layoffs. Find out:
- How lean techniques of value-stream-mapping and rapid improvement events cut the average “door-to-balloon” time for heart attack patients at two hospitals from 90 minutes to 37.
- What ThedaCare leaders did to replace medicine’s “shame and blame” culture with a lean culture based on continuous improvement and respect for people.How the lean principle of “building in quality at the source” broke down divisions among medical specialties allowing teams to develop patient care plans faster.
- Why traditional modern management is the single biggest impediment to lean healthcare.
- How the plan-do-study-act cycle coupled with rapid improvement events cut the wait time at a robotic radiosurgery unit from 26 days to six.
- How the lean concept of “one piece flow” saved time in treating ischemic stroke patients, increasing the number of patients receiving a CT scan within 25 minutes from 51% to 89%.
- How senior leaders at other healthcare organizations can begin their own lean transformations using a nine-step action plan based on what ThedaCare did — and what it would do differently.
Toussaint and Gerard prove that lean healthcare does not mean less care. On the Mend shows that when care is truly re-designed around patients, waste and errors are eliminated, quality improves, costs come down, and healthcare professionals have more time to spend with patients, who get even better care. Order your copy of this important new book today.
What the Experts are Saying About This Book?
“Everyone interested in medical care should read this book. It describes a way to markedly improve outcomes from medical care interventions, while simultaneously reducing costs.”
“The ideas practiced at ThedaCare in Wisconsin should be adopted across the country. If they are, it will be easy to afford financial access for every citizen, because we will reduce national medical care spending by hundreds of billions of dollars per year, while improving outcomes.”
– Paul H. O’Neill, former Alcoa CEO and U.S. Treasury Secretary, and co-founder of the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative
“I avoid reading business improvement books. I made an exception because this one came from ThedaCare, one of the 2 or 3 US health care organizations that consistently score at the top of national and regional rankings on BOTH quality and affordability.”
“In On the Mend, John Toussaint and Roger Gerard explain simply, clearly and briefly how it was done. They use story-based prose. It can be read in a single day by a high school graduate. Its sweet logic and instant digestibility resonate with the book’s topic – how to deliver more patient benefit with less time and fewer resources.”
“Worried that reaching the top of national rankings on quality and affordability is unattainable by ordinary mortals? Read this book in one day. Then ask your organization’s most senior physicians, most junior clerks and everyone in between to read it. Your journey will have begun.”
– Arnold Milstein, MD, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Clinical Excellence Research Center at Stanford University
“We need health care that is sustainable and excellent – both. That will require rethinking our work and redesigning our systems of care boldly and guided by proper theory. These authors are masters of the change we need; under their guidance, ThedaCare has become a bright spot in the landscape of American health care. Their work and this book show that lean thinking and true patient-centeredness are not just compatible; they are, at heart, the very same thing.”
– Donald Berwick, MD, MPP, FRCP, President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement
“The USA is twisted in knots debating health care payment reform, afflicted as it is with a system that is compromised in quality, affordability, and access. But for all the talk, changing payment schemes promise nothing but zero sum tradeoffs. The real potential for win win improvement is at the provider level–adoption of more sophisticated approaches to managing the delivery of care so far more value is created while requiring fewer resources and less effort.”
“John Toussaint, as former CEO of ThedaCare, has demonstrated how this is done, and if his organization’s approach and results were replicated nationally, we would be having health care surplus, not crisis.”
– Steven J. Spear, Author of The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition, Sr. Lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Sr. Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement
“ThedaCare has become a national leader at delivering measurably better value to its patients. This book is a practical tool for any health care leader to create better patient value in health care, and begin the real process of health care reform.”
– Michael Porter, Author of Redefining Health Care
To purchase as an e-book for Kindle click the following link: On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry