Mary Greeley Medical Center

Interview with Brian Dieter - CEO
 

We’re a 220 bed community hospital; we’ve been on a Lean Journey for several years, although we haven’t formally identified it as a “Lean Journey.” We specifically tried to avoid a lot of the jargon. We just want to make it simple – let’s get the people closest to the work involved in improving the work. And if we do that over and over again, we do it daily, one of the things we’ve said is we want to get better at getting better.

We want to get better at getting better.

How does KaiNexus fit into your Lean journey?

For us, KaiNexus gave us a framework and a vehicle to capture improvement ideas; it gave us software to help quantify it. But I’d say most importantly it gave us a spark to get ideas that we already had in our knowledge bank implemented. I had more than one leader say to me, “I wanted to get this done, I just needed a push. And our 100 day workout using the KaiNexus system helped us get that push.

What is your favorite opportunity for improvement?

I don’t have a favorite opportunity for improvement yet; it’s hard to pick out of fifty-four. I wouldn’t say they’re quite like your children where they’re all supposed to be your favorite, but clearly what I’m “favorited” about is the fact that we had fifty-four OIs. That’s widespread involvement in our organization; good participation across all of our functions, across all of our disciplines.

What’s next?

Well, I think we’ve been challenged now by Mark Graban from KaiNexus to take it to the next level – to use our 100 day workout process not just for revenue generation, expense savings, but using it in all of our strategic initiatives to say, “How can we demonstrate that we have done something in a 100 day process,” and utilizing the software will certainly help. It gives us one place to look; it gives us a proven technology that now we’re comfortable with. And I look forward to seeing what our next 100 day workout looks like.