Lean Thinking in health care: cost containment, better outcomes

The concept of “lean thinking” or “lean management” is usually associated with Japanese manufacturing, particularly the Toyota Production System. In the last few years it has increasingly applied to health services in order to eliminate waste and create value. Lean thinking is a management system, a philosophy with a positive impact on health services. Today, health care organizations are facing the challenge of improving the quality of services with limited resources. By defining the value-added steps and eliminating the non-value-added steps through lean thinking, hospital quality levels can be significantly improved, but also to achieve large cost savings

Keywords: Lean thinking, quality of health services, cost savings, waste, value