If you view health care as a process, like Toyota treats building a car, it saves lives!
It’s insane how behind the times the health care industry is. It’s 2008, protocols have been around for I don’t know, thousands of years. And finally we’re fighting a real battle to implement them in surgical suites all across America when it’s so damn obvious that following a protocol would eliminate error.
Following protocols simply saves lives. It also ensures quality in building a car, hence, the reason why Toyota is pulling a profit and our dinosaurs are dying a much slower, dinosaur death now that we’re prolonging their lives on the bailout ventilator.
During my residency at Hopkins, I worked for three months in Peter Provonost’s Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care. This is where I was first exposed to Toyota Lean and where much of my thinking about Hello Health came from.
The guiding principle of Toyota Lean is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination.
This is the ultimate goal of Hello Health. How can we eliminate as many steps as possible in the delivery of traditional and alternative health care? We’ve already done a good job, but it just keeps getting better thanks to some of these amazing partnerships we’ve lined up for the next nationwide iteration of Hello Health.