Mark Graban - Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Engagement, Second Edition

Leaders of todays healthcare organizations are on a continuous journey to improve results, requiring a relentless focus on improving the underlying process of care delivery and leadership practices. Mark has written a book that provides compelling ideas to help create better places to work, practice medicine and receive safe, high quality care.

Quint Studer
Founder and CEO of Studer Group, a 2010 recipient of the
Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award
Author of Hardwiring Excellence: Purpose, Worthwhile Work, Making a
Difference and Results That Last: Hardwiring Behaviors That Will Take Your Company to the Top

Mark Graban is the consummate translator of the vernacular of the Toyota Production System into the everyday parlance of health care. With each concept and its application, the reader is challenged to consider what is truly possible in the delivery of health care if only standardized systems borrowed from reliable industries were implemented. Graban provides those trade secrets in an understandable and transparent fashion.

Richard P. Shannon, MD
Frank Wister Thomas Professor of Medicine
Chairman, Department of Medicine
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

There is an enormous shortfall between the health care we receive and what we actually get. Mark Graban explains how those in the system can make care delivery better for everyone patients, providers, and payors.

Steven J. Spear
Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and Senior Fellow at IHI
Author of The High Velocity Edge

Mark Graban has been tirelessly studying the application of LEAN to health care, with an emphasis on respect for the people served by the system as well as the people who provide excellent care. He has an accurate sense of how things work in health systems, which makes his work more meaningful for people who want to make health care better.

Ted Eytan, MD

The concepts outlined in this book are the most powerful tools that I have ever encountered to foster innovation, ownership, and accountability at the front line staff level. This is a must-read for any leader in todays increasingly complex healthcare industry.

Brett Lee, PhD, FACHE
SVP of Health System Operations, Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta

The Lean approach to healthcare, including a strong emphasis on culture, is the best way to ensure the optimal patient experience. The multiple examples of the application of Lean given in this book provide a wealth of information to draw from for a hospital that is venturing into Lean principles for the first time. In addition, this book emphasizes not only methodology, but also the cultural changes that must occur for sustainabilitysomething often forgotten in change management.

Beverly B. Rogers, MD
Chief of Pathology, Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta
Clinical Professor of Pathology, Emory University School of Medicine

Finally! The healthcare industry has needed this book for many years. Informative, understandable, and timely, Mark Grabans book will leave you with an appreciation for what Lean is and what it can do for your hospital. After you read this book, Ill be surprised if you dont make implementing Lean your highest strategic priority.

Jim Adams
Senior Director, Laboratory Operations, Childrens Medical Center, Dallas

Its obvious that Mark Graban has spent time in the trenches of healthcare and understands the complexities of applying the Lean philosophy and tools to that environment. If you want to improve your chances of surviving in todays healthcare system (both literally and figuratively), read this book.

Dean Bliss
Improvement Advisor, Iowa Healthcare Collaborative

Graban provides a helpful translation of the terms, practices, and tools of Lean thinking into hospitals everyday situations and challenges. His book illustrates Leans elements with many actual examples of Lean applications in typical hospital practices and procedures. Grabans book should definitely be on the reading list for those who want to bring the benefits of Lean thinking to healthcare.

David Mann
Principal, David Mann Lean Consulting

Lean health care is becoming a global movement. The reasons given are overrun costs, errors that compromise patient safety, time of patients wasted, and general bureaucratic inefficiency. In Lean terms the problem is how to eliminate waste. Health care is different than car making. This is true but many, many hospitals are finding the principles of the Toyota Production System apply well and are making remarkable improvements. Unfortunately the remarkable improvements are in specific areas and challenging to sustain because of a mysterious ingredient that the folks at Toyota seem to understand quite wellhumans. The humans that health care exist to help also operate the system and are far from perfect. Toyotas system is actually designed to support the development of people, not to provide a quick fix set of technical solutions, and this takes time and patience. Many health care consultants have rebadged themselves as Lean consultants and do not understand the real thinking behind the Toyota Production System. Mark Graban is an exception. He has worked hard to study the philosophy and stay true to the thinking of Toyota. His book is a welcome translation of the Toyota Production System into language any health care professional can understand.

Jeffrey K. Liker
Professor, University of Michigan
Author of The Toyota Way