How can Six Sigma help to the healthcare industry?

Six Sigma is implemented in a variety of sectors to optimize operations by removing waste and decreasing mistakes, as well as resulting in higher revenue and happier consumers. 

A mistake in healthcare can be the difference between life and death. Where Six Sigma can improve patient safety by eliminating life-threatening errors. 

Fundamentally, this business deals with life and death situations, where Six Sigma techniques are crucial in reducing flaws that lead to medical mistakes. 

Six Sigma Methodology – DMAIC

Implementing Six Sigma in healthcare doesn’t only help to improve quality but also helps to solve healthcare problem. The DMAIC approach – “define, measure, analyze, improve and control” is a well-known organized problem-solving methodology for business process.

Define

This step defines who the patients are, what’s the patients wants and needs. And the process capabilities provide objectives for project-based improvement efforts. 

Measure 

This step measures the quality characteristics that reflects improvement in patients’ satisfaction and product performance and provides the metrics of data on which the improvement efforts will be based. 

The performance of healthcare must be measured in terms of improvements such as patient’s happiness, service cost, clinical excellence rate, and other factors can all be used to assess changes or improvements.

Analyze 

In this step, data collected from previous steps which is analyzed using analytical tools such as praetor analysis, process flow diagram, fish-bone diagram, statistical process control charts, for identifying necessary design and process modification for achieving patient satisfaction and performance objective. 

Improve

Several improvements and alterations to the patient care strategy may be required during the Improvement stage. This stage requires good monitoring of the performance of these enhancements in order to track progress.

Control

The benefits from the previous phases are consolidated in this step. It may entail the implementation of new rules, procedures, and other measures to guarantee that care meets the high standards set by the DMAIC processes.

Black belt Six Sigma can help healthcare in different way, some of which are listed below:

• It can reduce waiting time in hospitals.

• It can prevent injuries in hospital. 

• It can reduce unnecessary expenses. 

• It can increase turnaround time for lab results. 

• It can reduce medication errors when prescribing drugs and medicine. 

Six Sigma Healthcare Uses & Examples 

Although Six Sigma is relatively new to the healthcare industry, it can be used to achieve optimal results in a variety of medical disciplines. 

For instance, Six Sigma black belt certification can be used to optimize resources and run devices such as MRIs and time scheduling for testing equipment. 

Six Sigma can also be used to release patients more quickly and arrange a higher priority service for them.

Nursing, therapies, hospital support, laboratory, technical and managerial services may all benefit from Six Sigma in healthcare. This notion can be supported by a variety of Six Sigma healthcare cases.

For example, Rapides Regional Medical Centre used Six Sigma in order to decrease faults in its emergency care unit. As a consequence, patient wait times were cut in half, and more patients were seen. Furthermore, the hospital was able to save $950,000 every year.

Similarly, by adopting Six Sigma methodology, Valley Baptist Health System was able to decrease surgical cycle time. They also increased their prospective annual earnings by $1.3 million. In addition, the hospital increased its capacity to accept 1,100 more surgical patients each year.

Furthermore, an instance, The Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island used Six Sigma methodology to oversee its embryo transfer operations. Their implementation rates have risen by 35%.

Conclusion

Implementation of Six Sigma in healthcare industry would be a prolific decision for managements.  It succors to maximize the profit, and stand on patient’s needs and wants. Hence It will take some fund to hire Six Sigma professional to make the process but in long term it helps hospitals to mark the success and provide better service to patients accordingly.