Successful Workplace

The following was first published on The TIBCO Blog. As shown in Healthcare Reform That Can’t Be Stopped, the Toyota Production System has found a home in healthcare. The Wisconsin-based TPS pioneer, ThedaCare, has been employing Toyota’s industrial efficiency principles in its hospitals to great effect for more than 10 years. Thedacare is now seeing great […]

The following was first published on the Harvard Business Review. It’s difficult to get senior executives who have been successful managing a particular way to realize that they need to change their approach. Yet this is exactly the challenge facing leaders of the finance function who are asked to help their organization improve the way […]

This is an outstanding TED talk by Dr. Atul Gawande, physician and author of The Checklist Manifesto on how to heal medicine. “The most expensive care is not necessarily the best care, and vice versa, the best care often turns out to be the least expensive; it has fewer complications and people get more efficient […]

Could healthcare take a lesson from the rock band Van Halen?  Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, describes a simple management tool that Van Halen used to quickly gauge process quality and compliance at their concert venues. By demanding M&M’s with all brown ones removed or face cancellation of the show with full compensation to the band. Evidently, they […]

My career in healthcare started in the early 90s, and it was a crazy time for the industry. The Clinton version of healthcare reform had just hit and the industry was trying to react quickly to the change in reimbursement levels for inpatient and outpatient services. It was a great time for a consultant seeking […]

Cycles of change follow predictable paths, often expressed with phrases like, “forming, storming, norming and performing.” We are squarely in the storming phase for healthcare reform implementation and its a good thing. The level of passion is remarkable. As a member of the LinkedIn Group Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, AKA HIMSS, I’ve watched […]

This is Part 2 of a three-part series on The coming storm in healthcare. The insurance industry, as it grew, developed standard codes to allow healthcare providers (such as doctors, clinics, hospitals) to bill for discreet services. There are 15,000 codes in the ICD-9 standard and it still isn’t enough. 10x The new standardized codes, […]

Healthcare is going through an unprecedented changes. Some of the change is forced by external regulatory mandates and some by rising costs and a sense that if we don’t do something soon, out-of-c0ntrol costs will force even more change from the outside. It would be easy to call this a crisis moment, though crisis implies […]