by Krishna Kumar Brindha (Author)

With rising pressure on healthcare providers to reduce costs and improve quality, an increasing number of organizations are looking to "Lean" tools and techniques as a breakthrough solution for performance improvement. Over the last four decades, Lean has emerged as one of the most impactful approaches to help increase an organization's competitiveness through improvements in process efficiency and a reduction in operational waste. Today, Lean is used in most global industries and virtually all organizational sectors including healthcare. The need for improvement in emergency departments with respect to the cost of care, the speed of service, crowding, and patient safety is now widely accepted. In an attempt to achieve broad improvement, health care organizations worldwide increasingly adopt an approach called "Lean management".