NEWS FROM THEDACARE™ FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
June 25, 2007
Wall Street Journal; Lean Enterprise Institute Focus on ThedaCare
Under the headline, “What Factory Managers Can Teach Hospital Wards,” a story on page B3 of today’s Wall Street Journal points to ThedaCare™ as a national example of how health care is increasingly turning to manufacturing expertise to become more efficient.
While the story focuses on the increasing influence of other industries on health care as a national trend, it cites ThedaCare as a national leader that began incorporating the concepts of Lean thinking and the Toyota Production System in 2002.
As part of that effort, ThedaCare introduced the “ThedaCare Improvement System” (TIS), which utilizes more than 50 internal facilitators to teach the tools of Lean, and to coordinate improvement events throughout the organization. The principle behind Lean is to reduce errors, eliminate waste, and deliver greater value to the customer.
ThedaCare defines value as delivering the highest standards of healthcare performance at the lowest cost. Since introducing TIS, ThedaCare’s performance has been among the leaders in Wisconsin and the nation for both high quality and low costs. ThedaCare credits the ThedaCare Improvement system with generating nearly $22 million in cost savings without layoffs by eliminating waste, reducing errors, and creating greater efficiency.
The Wall Street Journal story focuses specifically on the addition of three high-level managers with Lean manufacturing backgrounds to the ThedaCare leadership team since 2005, including Matt Furlan, the chief operating officer of Appleton Medical Center and Theda Clark Medical Center.
Also this week, ThedaCare President and CEO John Toussaint, MD, is one of the featured presenters at the “First Global Lean Healthcare Summit,” which is being held in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, UK. It is sponsored by the Lean Enterprise Academy, a non-profit organization associated with the Lean Global Network and the Lean Enterprise Institute. The Lean Enterprise institute was founded by two of the foremost experts on Lean, Professor Daniel T. Jones and Dr. James Womack, co-authors of The Machine That Changed The World and Lean Thinking. For more information on the First Global Lean Healthcare Summit and to review the list of speakers and other program information, please go to: http://www.leanuk.org/pages/lean_summit_2007.htm
ThedaCare (www.thedacare.org) is a community-owned health system consisting of Appleton Medical Center, Theda Clark Medical Center, New London Family Medical Center, ThedaCare Physicians, Ingenuity First, and other health care services. ThedaCare is the largest employer in Northeast Wisconsin with nearly 5,300 employees.
For more information, media may contact Megan Wilcox (megan.wilcox@thedacare.org), public relations specialist for ThedaCare, at (920) 830-5847, or pager (920) 554-0730, or John Gillespie (john.gillespie@thedacare.org), manager of ThedaCare public and government relations, at (920) 830-5846, or pager (920) 554-1317.
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