What is a lean assessment?
For over 20 years, lean assessments have been applied to healthcare settings with the goal of improving lab processes.The goal is not to identify flaws, but to focus on areas of improvement.
Your specific lab goals:
Optimize labour resources to allow for increased productivity and efficiency
Improve staff efficiency and optimize staffing workload
Improve turnaround time from the point of collection to reported results
Improve specimen quality, reduce rework and eliminate errors and erroneous processes
How does a lab lean assessment work?
Starting a lean journey in any department can be daunting. It is critical to have alignment across the team regarding areas of improvement.
The journey toward lean assessment
| Step | 1 | Awareness | Understanding and agreeing to identify key processes and find the best path forward |
| 2 | Observe | Engaging with our team to observe, map out and analyze a process of interest to create change | |
| 3 | Design | Designing options to consider including new technologies or workflow variations | |
| 4 | Collaborate | Collaborating with laboratory stakeholders to determine best fit and implementation of a plan | |
| 5 | Sustain | Validating new process workflows to include monitoring tools. Sustainable processes are key to success |
Diagram showing technician movement in the lab before the lean assessment was done
Diagram showing technician movement in the lab after the lean assessment was done and changes implemented 
