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n his inauguration speech, President Obama called for improving health care quality and reducing costs. In 2008, U.S. health care costs exceeded $2.4 trillion and are expected to climb to $3.1 trillion by 2012, according to the National Coalition on Health Care.

Of these costs, 25 percent to 40 percent are caused by unnecessary delays, defects, and deviations that can be easily corrected with lean Six Sigma. That’s $600 billion to nearly $1 trillion dollars a year in unnecessary costs.

Although most visits to the emergency department (ED) take two to four hours (from admission to discharge), the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in Hamilton, New Jersey, a 2005 Baldrige Award winner, does it in 38 minutes for a discharged patient. The hospital offers a 30-minute door-to-doctor guarantee. The staff accomplished this by rethinking the emergency experience from the patient’s point of view.

The clinical side isn’t the only issue to be addressed. Health care operations—billing, ordering, and so on—waste even more money. Insurance companies are quick to reject claims and slow to pay the claims they do accept, which causes more problems. One health care provider found ways, using lean Six Sigma, to reduce denied claims by $330,000 a month.

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