Wouldn’t it be music to your ears if you knew that you had a friendly neighborhood Six Sigma Physician? You bet!
Well, if you are near any one of those Quest Diagnostics Inc. labs, then you can sleep well at night because you have actually a Six Sigma physician in the person of Herman Hurwitz. What does he do?
Dr. Hurwitz makes sure that you get your laboratory results fast and reliable. His goal is for the 300 technicians and 17 physicians on his staff to turn around routine lab work overnight and have results back to doctors by 6:30 a.m. They process about 25,000 test orders a day.
Quest Diagnostics has been following Six Sigma management doctrine for seven years to reduce errors and improve efficiency. “Do we make errors? Yes, of course we do,” Hurwitz said. “But when we do, we find out why and we fix it.”
On the efficiency side, the lab questions every step its technicians take to accomplish a task – literally. “We look at something as simple as a technologist walking around the counter,” he said. “Do they really have to walk around the counter?”
This is the value of incorporating Six Sigma into your processes. You know exactly what to do and how to achieve results.
Source:
Philly.com a Six Sigma Zone featured link
