TAMC emergency department LEAN project
highlighted as a national model
PRESQUE ISLE — TAMC has been recognized for improving efficiency in its emergency department where patients sometimes waited for longer than the hospital felt necessary to receive the top-notch care with the latest technology in a state-of-the-art facility that TAMC provides.
Photo courtesy of TAMC
TAMC FACILITY ENGINEER Tim Doak, left, and Director of Emergency and Critical Care Services Daryl Boucher look over the plans for the emergency department renovation at TAMC recently while reviewing the improvements that have been made since the LEAN project was initiated in 2012.
In an effort to improve the patient wait time, they adopted the LEAN process, developed by David Mann, which looks at inefficiencies in process and seeks to eliminate those inefficiencies to help the organization run more smoothly.
“The LEAN project was really designed to accomplish two things,” said Daryl Boucher, director of emergency and critical care services. “First, we wanted to improve the efficiency of moving patients through the emergency department. We focused specifically on the time a person arrives to the time a decision is made to discharge them home, transfer them or admit them as an inpatient.
“The second was focused on patient and staff safety,” he said. “There was not one initiative, but rather a whole bunch of them, implemented simultaneously, that all helped move us to the goal of moving patients through our emergency department more efficiently.”
Since beginning the LEAN project, patient satisfaction scores significantly improved to above the national average, according to Facility Engineer Timothy M. Doak. In fact, the success that TAMC has seen since implementing the first phase of the LEAN project caught the attention of Avatar Solutions, who included a case study on TAMC’s results in a recent report shared with hospitals all over the nation.
Continuing this leadership role, Doak led a webinar Dec. 10 with clinical and administrative personnel from hospitals across the nation to discuss the overall LEAN project approach and how the hospital completed their analysis, some of the specific process changes that they implemented, and how they worked to ensure that staff remained engaged in the process.
The hospital first kicked off the LEAN project during the late summer/early fall of 2011.
Doak said that LEAN is “a continuous improvement process,” and even though they have been pleased with the results to date, they will continue to evaluate their performance and keep adjusting processes to make them better indefinitely.
