At Therapeutics Daily is an interesting article on employing Six Sigma in patient care. Six Sigma in healthcare is relatively new, and most of these Six Sigma applications are predominantly limited to business processes.
Some examples:
- Charleston Area Medical Center used Six Sigma to reduce the inventory of surgical equipment and related costs.
- Mount Carmel Health was able to redefine their billing standards, thus reducing bad debts.
- Scottsdale Healthcare reduced the time taken to find a bed and transfer a patient out of the emergency room, resulting in an increased capacity for the emergency department.
- Virtual Health improved patient satisfaction and reduced the length of stay for its congestive heart failure patients by using the Six Sigma principles and tools.
However, Six Sigma has yet to be used for patient care. So according to the same article, if Six Sigma is incorporated with continuous quality improvement (CQI), it can definitely improve patient care.
Much of the CQI structure has been developed from the work of Donabedian, a well-known physician, who developed a model for assessing quality that has become the standard in the health services field. The Donabedian model proposes that healthcare quality should be examined in the three domains of:
- (1) structure;
- (2) process; and
- (3) outcome (Donabedian, 1980).
A close look at these three domains shows a remarkable similarity with the four stages of Six Sigma which are:
- (1) identification;
- (2) characterization;
- (3) optimization; and
- (4) institutionalization.
Source: Six Sigma Zone
