Applying Lean Six Sigma for Public Healthcare Services

Main Article Content

Montri Wiboonrat

Abstract

- After the Subprime mortgage crisis or hamburger crisis in USA, every global business has struggled to cut cost, but those struggles are aggravated in healthcare services. As healthcare service is not compromise with cost and quality. Cost reduction may not be a good option for developing country healthcare services. According to healthcare and culture of public healthcare services (PHS) in developing country is least competitive already when compare to private healthcare services sector. The government has a long term planning to rise up public healthcare services to achieve international standard such as health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA) of international services but as the same time they must have to sustain on the same quality of services. The improvement of healthcare services on competitive advantage and maintain on service quality are the primary purpose of this research. The design approach of this research is to develop service operations improvement in term of speed, accuracy, availability and quality of electronic medical records (EMR). The public healthcare service model is applied two concepts of Lean and Six Sigma to develop strategic model. Lean concept is to improve the process lifecycle and eliminate waste in processes of healthcare services in form of lead time and delivery time. Service operations improvement (SOI) is took a place of the annual budgeting plan; annual investment and daily operations, and expected service quality delivery (SQD). The quality service delivery measures from levels of satisfaction from all stakeholders such as patients, employees, shareholders, and suppliers. The result of improvement is not only increased customer’s satisfaction levels but also increased more chance to save more people. Six Sigma helps continue improvement in lifecycle process of service quality subject to resource utilization, increasing capability of service without cost reduction, and eliminate defect or error from diagnosis, operations, and admissions process. Lean Six Sigma is creating a new value stream for our customer’s satisfaction and growth at low cost for employees and stakeholders, that means public healthcare services have more profits to sustain operations, revitalize reserves, and refund on the capital investment. Moreover, Lean Six Sigma is initiating value stream; minimizing work-in-process; mistake-proofing work by eliminating the chances for human error; and increasing image and reputation for public healthcare services.

Article Details

How to Cite
[1]
M. Wiboonrat, “Applying Lean Six Sigma for Public Healthcare Services”, JIST, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–11, Jun. 2011.
Section
Research Article: Soft Computing (Detail in Scope of Journal)

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