Advanced Lean In Healthcare

It's pretty much all here in the book and quite accessible, to the extent that 21st Century - Toyota Way - management practice fits in a book. It's obvious the authors have a ton of priceless in-the-Gemba experience, which must greatly enrich their consulting (we can hope that Drs. Albanese and Platchek wind up as senior execs and directors sooner rather than later). If they only could explain how to best address the key executive leadership/board of directors issues they describe as crisply and imaginatively as they demonstrate the thinking and practices for flow and value in daily work, then the book would be perfect. Of course, this is a very tall an order when received wisdom for healthcare enterprise success pulls executive and board focus toward "going big or going home." Even Toyota got into trouble when they grew too rapidly.

This was purchased for the company

Slow to start but stick with it. We all need to embrace lean principles and you might as well have a blueprint to follow. If you follow the steps in this excellent guide, you will have many successful improvements.

Kindle version had pages missing.

Teaching what is necessary to really benefit from lean in healthcare (hospital) by taking on the challenge of true system change and improvement.

This book is awful… truly awful. Craig’s writing is boring, misinformed and truly tone deaf to all things happening in the healthcare field. This is not a book I would ever recommend. After a year of using this book as a coffee coaster, I threw it away and I am a better person for it. There is a reason why you can’t find this book in bookstores or anywhere else… because it is as useful and informative as a Walmart furniture assembly manual written in French.

Good book. Just needed it for points at work

The content is good, but is very restrictive to what a particular consulting group feels is the "right" way to implement Lean in healthcare settings. They use an example of moving from playing hockey (randonmess) to ballet (predictability), and I think they could've used a better analogy. And they seem to indicate that getting above a "line" to move from their level 2 to higher levels of Lean is some huge barrier to overcome. This sets up the reader to consider it an impossible task and this could prevent people from taking on the work. Overall, I feel they've complicated something the Japanese have done much more simply, but it's still very useful information and provides good direction. What they are lacking is more information about methods. They seem to push the installation of visual management systems, but what about all of the issues those systems raise to the surface? How do you go about fixing those?