Truman Medical Center President/CEO John W. Bluford has focused his new efforts to giving better measuring tools and ongoing process improvement. Bluford believes that by doing this, TMC will result in a more robust corporate transformation that will energize the Center’s service to both internal (management, doctors, and staff) and external customers (patients and visitors).
To achieve this vision, TMC has hired Kamran Jahanshahi as Senior Vice President. Jahanshashi is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, who joins TMC from Citibank where he co-developed Citigroup’s Six Sigma Program, Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty Through People & Quality. He has this to say about Six Sigma.
Six Sigma methodologies aim to reduce the variation and “non-value added” activity in clinical and business process, which give rise to long cycle times, high cost and poor outcomes. A process that operates at true Six Sigma levels is producing acceptable quality levels over 99.9999997% of the time. This increase in performance and decrease in process variation leads to defect reduction and vast improvement in profits, employee morale and quality of product, and ultimately in an excellent customer experience.
In the same article, it was mentioned that those those hospitals that have adopted Six Sigma, including Yale New Haven Hospital, John Hopkins, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, New York Presbyterian and Health South, have already experiences significant benefits to their respective organizations. Noted improvements have included:
1. Emergency Department, Operating Room, Laboratory and Radiology patient flow and cycle time
2. Billing, coding and reimbursements
3. Reducing bloodstream infection rates in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit
4. Reducing length of stay for patients with congestive heart failure
5. Supply Chain Management Improvements
In fact, a typical Six Sigma project in healthcare has delivered an average of $500,000 in annualized savings. Jahanshahi further said that because of these recent developments, more and more healthcare leaders and pharmaceutical, insurance and for-profit health systems have turned to Six Sigma in the past four years.
TMC therefore will be the first not-for-profit healthcare providers to use Six Sigma. The Lean Six Sigma program at TMC will be called TMC Innovation Process (TIP) and will begin this fourth quarter of 2005. The launch of TIP will include the training and projects of Six Sigma blackbelts (approximately 4% of exempt employees) and greenbelts (approximately 40% of exempt employees).
“These projects will be across the organization and will be more about a shift in the culture of the organization, and TMC expects to see improvements in the third quarter of 2006,” Jahanshahi discloses.
