Six Sigma in Healthcare

Six Sigma, TQM, and Lean Manufacturing in Healthcare

For healthcare organizations improving quality of care is vitally important to success. There have been many different strategies to improving quality but right now the strategy of Six Sigma has been the leading idea in the United States. Originally developed by Motorola in 1986, Six Sigma is a business management strategy. A customer focused approach; Six Sigma has the potential to see vast improvements in the quality aspect through reducing variation in the system.

In such a dynamic market, the need to improve quality as well as specific skills is ever so increasing in the healthcare industry. The global market in general as we know it is one that is very competitive and has also put pressure on many organizations. Achieving customer satisfaction is what every organization strides for and by producing products with high quality they can accomplish it. By adopting the Six Sigma strategy organizations can now progress towards improving the quality of their products. Improving the quality can be done by first identifying and then removing the causes of defects and variation in manufacturing and business processes. Many organizations have decided to adopt Six Sigma in hopes that it will cure product defects as well as lean manufacturing. In healthcare, the overall goal is to improve the quality of care delivered to the patient while at the same ensuring patient safety.

Six Sigma has been said to have been developed by the environment created by total quality management. This movement called for significant and continuous improvement in the quality of patient care outcomes, processes, and services. This TQM method was implemented by many organizations but did have many flaws leading to its demise. What it came down to was that overall TQM was not producing financial gains therefore causing many people to begin to doubt the system. It also was proven that when major changes were required TQM often became confusing and eventually led to more problems. Without the evidence of better patient outcomes, increased satisfaction, and increased monetary gains TQM would eventually become extinct. Six Sigma then came in and developed new strategies such as time and money deliverables and the Six Sigma Metric. The time and money deliveries concept focused on doable quality improvement projects. These projects were identified based on quality parameters and then goals were established based on customer wants, not internal conditions like TQM focused on. These projects have claimed to save organizations a half million dollars or more per year. Six Sigma prides itself on being able to perform projects error-free with the overall goal of improving quality.

The Six Sigma metric can be used to locate where a process, outcome, or organization is in its quality improvement effort as compared to others. This metric provides a starting ground for improvement and if an organization can get to a sigma level of 4.0 they are doing a very good job. This differs from TQM because they didn't have any way to quantify the level of quality that a healthcare organization had attained. Like TQM, Six Sigma will be challenged and may eventually demise as the dominant quality improvement approach for healthcare organizations in the United States. Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is one of the challenges facing the current Six Sigma approach. It is a relatively new approach and it focuses on taking effective Six Sigma organization to an even higher level. People can argue that this isn't a challenge to the original Six Sigma; it's actually a positive thing. I personally believe that it is a good thing because it has the opportunity to build off each other and it can eventually get the sigma level to 5.0 or even 6.0. There is also another challenger to the current process and that challenger comes in form of an approach known as lean manufacturing.

Lean manufacturing was derived from the Toyota Production System which requires a disciplined attitude to seek out and eliminate all waste in every area of a process including customer relations, supplier networks, and organization management. The ultimate goal of lean manufacturing is to produce quality outcomes by instilling the discipline to reduce cost, generate capital, make money, bring in more customers, and remain competitive in the market. Patients today now have the freedom to decide where to go and where not to go to acquire their medical services therefore creating the opportunity for lean health care to be part of a growth strategy. Now some companies have even combined the original Six Sigma and lean manufacturing and it has proven successful and has developed a new movement known as "Lean Six Sigma".

Many individuals have had a difficult time in dissecting the difference between Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma. This is such a difficult process