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- A not-for-profit healthcare organization that provides medical services and HMO coverage to more than 350,000 members chose Juran as its partner in its Six Sigma initiative to improve quality, increase patient satisfaction, and reduce costs. “The goal of our clinical project was to reduce the length of time a patient is on a ventilator, thereby avoiding potential complications associated with prolonged mechanical ventilation,” says the Director of Nursing and Leader of the Six Sigma team. “The results were a reduced average ventilator length of stay of 25 percent and a reduction of defects per million opportunities by 12 percent for annualized savings of $450,000. To hold the improvement gains, we continue to use Six Sigma methodologies to ensure that patients on ventilators receive care that is considered best practice.” This organization has 21 Black Belt performance improvement professionals and another 20 Green Belt operational leaders. As one of the Modern Healthcare’s top 10 integrated delivery systems for each of the last five years, this organization continually works to improve quality, increase patient satisfaction, and reduce costs.
- A large teaching hospital on the U.S. West Coast selected Juran as its partner in its process improvement initiative. This hospital experienced serious problems in some of its treatment support services. The root causes remained mysterious and elusive. Management decided the curiously poor-performing processes must be improved. One of the problems the hospital faced was the time it took for a physician to receive results of inpatient lab tests – only 50 percent of the laboratory tests were available by the stated goal of 8:30 a.m. At the conclusion of the project, the 8:30 a.m. goal was met 96 percent of the time. The second problem the hospital faced was the turnaround time for gynecologic cytology specimens, which took 25 to 30 days. The project reduced turnaround time to three to five working days.
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