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Hi, I’m Mark Graban, chief improvement officer at KaiNexus, where we make improvement easier...
Practicing kaizen every day is about finding the small problems that interfere with our
work or patient care. Lots of times, we might face a really small problem, something that
interrupts us or delays patient care for just a minute... and then we go on with our day.
We might think it’s just not a big deal... it’s just normal.
But if that problem is a recurring problem... the type of fire that we’re always fighting,
then fixing that problem helps us many times over... every day in the future multiplied
by all of our co-workers who face that same problem.
One real OI that was entered into KaiNexus involved ordering foot x-rays. Patients were
sometimes getting a two view x-ray instead of a three-view... A lot of times, things
like this aren’t even viewed as a problem.
In a world before KaiNexus, after getting the two-view x-ray results, the physician
would likely just order the third view and then go on with their day... but this causes
delays for the patients and extra work for radiology. With KaiNexus, it’s important
to ask what we can do to improve the process so we prevent problems... in this case making
sure the third view was being ordered correctly... getting the right x-rays the first time.
When a problem like this is entered into KaiNexus, even when you don’t know the root cause
or the solution, it increases visibility to the problem and people can work together to
fix it... In this case, one reason the x-ray orders are entered wrong was found to be the
lack of orientation for new staff members... and that can be improved, preventing incorrect
orders in the future.
In situations like this the discussion often uncovers additional problems and root causes
that can be addressed based off that initial problem.. improvement leads to more improvement.
Instead of just “dealing with” issues, people are using KaiNexus to address root
causes and prevent future problems.