On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry

by John Toussaint, Roger Gerard

Overview

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-de

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934109274
Publisher:	LEAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
Publication date:	06/10/2010
Pages:	181
Sales rank:	490,092
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

John Toussaint, MD

John is the founder and CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value. As the Center's founder and president, John has the experience and passion to be a driving force in creating healthcare value. From 2000 to 2008, he served as president and chief executive officer of ThedaCare, Inc., a community-owned, four-hospital health system including twenty-one physician clinics, as well as home health capabilities, senior care facilities, hospice care, and behavioral health. ThedaCare is the largest employer in Northeast Wisconsin with nearly 5,400 employees, serving an eight-county region.

During his tenure as president and CEO of ThedaCare, John introduced the ThedaCare Improvement System (TIS), which is derived from the Toyota Production System. This model of continuous improvement helped save millions of dollars in healthcare costs by reducing patient errors, improving outcomes and delivering better quality care at a higher value.

Roger Gerard, PhD

Roger is the Chief Learning Officer for ThedaCare, a N. E. Wisconsin-based integrated healthcare delivery system. He has been with ThedaCare since 1991, when ThedaCare was called Novus. Roger has a career history that includes primarily significant work within the healthcare industry. However, he has also spent a quarter of his career in manufacturing and service industries nationwide. He specializes in executive and management development, process improvement, and the use of lean methodologies in bringing about significant and measurable organizational improvement. In addition, he has his own management consulting business and creative photography/illustration business that he shares with his wife, Debra.

Roger has over 35 years of experience leading executive and management development initiatives, in both large and small organization environments, focusing specifically on organizational performance improvement processes. He has presented at numerous national conferences (most recently at the Association for Manufacturing Excellence on lean in the healthcare industry), and locally throughout Wisconsin and Michigan. Roger is a member of AQP, ASQ and OD Network. He earned his PhD in Management and Applied Decision Sciences from Walden University in 2001.

What People are Saying About This

Michael Porter

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)

Arnold Milstein

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)

Paul H. O'Neill

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)

Steven J. Spear

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)

Donald Berwick

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, Administrator for the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services, former President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement)