Driving for efficiency: Saving time and money while boosting quality

Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle got its philosophy of a lean production system from an unlikely source -- Toyota.

By Mike Norbut, AMNews staff. Oct. 3, 2005.

Crammed into a space only slightly larger than an exam room, eight Virginia Mason Medical Center employees -- including its CEO, an interventional cardiologist and a resident -- agonize over such hospital issues as equipment set-up and phone protocols -- topics not usually subject to detailed analysis.

But at Seattle's Virginia Mason, each movement of each employee adds value or contributes to waste, and nothing is too trivial to ignore.

During this week in August, group members are looking at how to shorten the time it takes a patient who enters the hospital with a heart attack to get an emergency angioplasty. The goal is to trim it from a 100-minute average to 50 minutes.

"We actually say to the team, 'No new people, no new space and no new money,' " said Gary S. Kaplan, MD, Virginia Mason's chair and CEO. "And you cannot say, 'You can't do that.' "

Every second matters, and Virginia Mason leaders prove it by timing employee tasks. The goal is to trim away unnecessary actions, leaving a lean system that saves lives and money.

If it sounds like a strategy for factory workers, it is. Virginia Mason leaders got their inspiration from the Toyota Motor Corp., which teaches its lean production principles around the world.

Toyota's concepts were developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s by its then-assembly manager, Taiichi Ohno, at a time when Toyota was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and couldn't afford major investments or more employees. The concepts are designed to increase efficiency and raise quality, while at the same time improving customer and employee satisfaction.