An Innovative Method for Standardizing Lean Management Approach in Hospitals

Lean management constitutes an emerging approach in the healthcare context, in order to increase quality of care and reduce costs. Nevertheless, literature shows the lack of a standardized method, especially in healthcare, due to the complexity of the involved processes. This paper proposes an innovative method for standardizing the lean management approach in Healthcare, in order to reduce wastes particularly in Hospitals. The integration of different techniques, such as IDEF0, and GQM, used in the process management is proposed, in order to let the overall method reproducible and repeatable. The application and feasibility of the method has been studied in an Italian Hospital.