Emergency Medical Services provide critical, life-saving care. Lean and Six Sigma help in the delivery. We’ll look at three applications and finish with a video of what’s it like to fly with London’s Air Ambulance.
Optimizing Emergency Services with Lean Six Sigma
In a magazine article titled “Optimizing emergency services with Lean Six Sigma” Casey Bedgood discusses the use of Lean Six Sigma on Navicent Health’s emergency medical services through a black belt project.
This is the process map with highlighted non-value added steps.
Post implementation results are shown in this figure.
You can read a version of the article here.
NOTE: This article originally appeared in Industrial Engineer Magazine (ISE Magazine) from which the aforementioned figures were included.
Lean Transportation and Emergency Medical Operations
In a paper titled “A Lean Transportation Approach for Improving Emergency Medical Operations” authors Bernardo Villarreal and others discuss the application of Lean Transportation to improving ambulance response times and turnaround times of the Red Cross operations located in Monterrey, Mexico.
The authors state that “… Lean transportation is an improvement approach for truck transportation operations that focuses on the identification of waste related to truck efficiency.”
The paper includes:
- Planned Waste Elimination Scheme
- Ambulance – Value Stream Map
- Summary of Impact of Initiatives Implemented
- Value Stream Map for EMS Operations
You can read the paper here.
Lean Process Improvement for Improved Patient Care on Emergency Ambulance Calls
In A Bachelor’s Thesis titled “Lean Process Improvement at the Boylston Fire Department” author Maria Luckette discusses the application of Lean and Six Sigma.
“The overall objective of this research was to determine how the Boylston Fire Department – a small
department staffed by a combination of full-time, per diem, and paid-per-call members – could improve
the quality of patient care provided on emergency ambulance calls”
“It was concluded that the department’s best chance at process improvement relies on the ability of the
department to implement a new inventory management system, as well as a more rigorous training
program”
Copy and paste the following link into your browser to read the thesis.
London’s Air Ambulance – A video from BBC London
See what London’s Air Ambulance team does in this video from BBC London.
You can watch the video here.
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