(Productivity Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- Already proven to increase efficiencies in the manufacturing sector, standard work has become a key element in reducing process waste, ensuring patient safety, and improving health care services. As part of the Taylor and Francis Lean Tools for Healthcare series, this reader-friendly book, Standard Work for Lean Healthcare, by Rona Consulting Group and Productivity Press, and edited by Thomas L. Jackson (Productivity Press, 2011), builds on the success of the bestselling book, Standard Work for the Shop Floor which was created by the Productivity Press Development Team in 2002.

Standard Work for Lean Healthcare explains how to apply this powerful lean tool to increase patient safety and reduce the cost of providing health care services. It illustrates how standardization can help you establish best practices for performing daily work, and why it should be the cornerstone for all of your continuous improvement efforts. Presented in an easy-to-assimilate format, the book describes work in terms of cycle time, work in process, takt time, and layout. It also defines the key concepts of standard work and explores the essential elements of a continuous improvement culture. The book provides detailed guidance through the process of creating, maintaining, and improving standards.

A joint effort between the Rona Consulting Group and Productivity Press, this book presents invaluable insights from pioneers in lean thinking to help you avoid common mistakes that can lead to unnecessary wastes of time and resources. Each richly illustrated chapter includes a chapter summary, reflection questions, and margin assists that highlight key terms, how-to steps, and health care examples—making this an essential resource for health care professionals starting out on their lean journey.

Topics in this book include:
• Industrial origins of lean in health care
• Production, processes, and operations in health care
• The characteristics, sources, and types of standards
• What is standardization?
• What is standard work?
• Standard processes and reliable lean health care methods
• Standard work is a prerequisite of lean health care and further drives improvement
• Evidence-based practice and the culture of continuous improvement
• The benefits of standardization and standard work for the organization, patients, clinicians, and staff
• How to create standards and standard operations
• What to include in standards documentation (e.g., technical and process standards sheets and equipment manuals)
• Stages of standards improvement and detailed guidance through the process of creating, maintaining, and improving standards
• Standard task and work sequence
• Standard time (takt time, cycle time, wait time, lead time)
• What to include in standard work documentation
• Five steps to standard work
• 10 guidelines for maintaining and improving standard work
• Applications of standardization
• Applications of standard work (e.g., managing health care service production processes, patient safety, hourly rounding, and satisfied employees)
• Reflecting and applying what you’ve learned, and implementing standardization, and standard work in your organization
• Further reading about the 5S system and lean in health care, plus useful websites

About the authors and editor

Rona Consulting Group’s commitment and expertise is in helping health care organizations and purchasers of health care to achieve the highest quality through zero defects, increased customer satisfaction, empowerment of staff, and improvement in financial performance through the application of the Toyota Management System (aka the Toyota Production System). Rona Consulting Group is located in the Seattle Metropolitan area on Mercer Island in Lake Washington.

For more than 20 years, Productivity Press has developed the largest catalog available anywhere of publications and learning tools about continuous improvement. Today Productivity Press, which is part of the Taylor & Francis Group, is the premier source of authoritative information on organizational improvement. Productivity Press is also part of CRC Press; when you browse and search for Productivity Press products you will be directed to www.CRCPress.com.

Thomas L. Jackson, Ph.D., is the former CEO of Productivity Inc. and Productivity Press, and a member of the influential Ford Lean Advisory Group. Jackson has been a student of lean enterprise since 1988, when he copyedited Hiroyuki Hirano’s JIT Factory Revolution for Productivity Press and reworked two chapters of Yasuhiro Monden’s groundbreaking Japanese Management Accounting (Productivity Press, 1998). Looking at pictures of Japanese factories and reading about how differently the Japanese count their money, Jackson became so fanatical about lean that he left his comfortable position as a professor of business at the University of Vermont to start his own lean consulting company—in Malaysia. There, he learned that the powerful techniques of lean enterprise—just in time (JIT),  single-minute exchange of die (SMED), total productive maintenance (TPM), and kanban—were only half of the story of Toyota’s great success. The other half of the story was hoshin kanri (aka the “balanced scorecard”) and a revolution in the structure of modern business organization.

In 2005, Jackson started applying Toyota’s operational and management methods in health care in a small rural clinic in Seward, Alaska. In 2008, he decided to trade his Levi Dockers for a pair of black scrubs and joined Mike Rona, former president of Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center, as a partner in the Rona Consulting Group, where he and Rona are “transforming health care and pursuing perfection.” In 2007, Jackson was awarded a Shingo Research Prize for his book, Hoshin Kanri for the Lean Enterprise (CRC Press, 2006).