What does it mean to adopt Lean in healthcare?  Doing some process mapping?  Scheduling a Gemba event?  What about “stopping the line”?  This last concept can be a real hurdle because of the culture of a hospital.  From a recent Healthleaders Media article:

Hospital senior leadership turnover is a problem.  It makes it is difficult to implement long term strategic plans.  It’s hard to get buy-in from physicians and staff on operational changes when they believe the leadership team won’t be around to see it through.

Structured selection tools have been used for decades in many industries.  If properly designed and used, they improve quality, reduce turnover, reduce injuries and enhance legal defensibility.

In an interesting twist in healthcare hiring, we now have physicians seeking advice on how to “select” their employer.  They realize that the financial success and the personal satisfaction of their career will depend, to a large extent, on choosing the right situation.  They come out of residency poorly prepared to evaluate potential practice settings, be they with a group or a hospital.  Not surprisingly, a few years into their career, they often discover that it is not what they were looking for and they are back to square one.  This is not the sort of career uncertainty they envisioned when they entered the medical profession.

The wave of physician employment by hospitals continues. Unfortunately, so does the rather haphazard approach to managing this growing and very unique workforce.  We’ve not thought of how to incorporate this workforce phenomenon into the overall healthcare hiring strategy.

In December of 2010, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) took the position that hospitals were subject to its jurisdiction as a result of contracts to provide care under TRICARE, the federal government’s healthcare program for active duty and retired military and their families.  See Directive 293 from OFCCP Director Patricia Shiu.