For more than five years, Denver Health staff — from the CEO to cleaning crews — have been cutting waste, streamlining and finding ways to improve patient care and efficiency.
Adherence to a production practice called LEAN had already paid off. Denver Health executives estimate the program has saved $88 million in operational expenses and helped safeguard all 5,500 Denver Health jobs. And as the rubble of a collapsed economy piled around them, Denver Health officials didn’t have to cut care for the city’s uninsured and underserved.
Now, Denver Health has gotten an international award for its LEAN-inspired slim-down.
Today, Denver Health chief executive Dr. Patricia Gabow will accept . Denver Health is the first health care delivery organization to win the prize, established in 1988 at the University of Utah to recognize efficiency.
To win, organizations have to do more than save money, said Robert Miller, the prize’s executive director.
“The expectation … is that they do something significant and fundamental to change the culture of their organization,” he said.
At Denver Health, the culture change started, Gabow said, “because I was frustrated that we were doing things much like when I was an intern 40 years ago.”
Medicine and treatments had changed, but the systems for getting care to patients were stuck in time. Gabow cast about for a way to change things and found the LEAN system, created by Toyota after World War II.
Gabow assembled a blue-ribbon team of customer-service and waste- elimination advisers from organizations as diverse as Seimens and the Ritz-Carlton.
She then assembled groups of employees and asked for their thoughts.Those sessions have evolved to regular, week-long Rapid Improvement Events that put a particular department under a microscope.
Change comes from employees, and they have altered the Denver Health landscape in ways visible and not so visible.
When a team examined operating room practices, it concluded that a simple change in how antibiotics are given before surgery could save time and money. The switch also has vastly reduced the surgical-infection rate.
Huge savings or not, Gabow isn’t finished with LEAN. “I don’t know how long this will last,” she said, “but I know it will outlast me.”
