It was yet another day of challenges for Dr. Surana, the head of a Super Speciality hospital which is located in Ahmednagar district. About 290 Km from Mumbai, on the Ahmednagar – Manmad State highway, the hospital is developed as a super-specialty institute with special emphasis on services to the poor and non-affluent classes of the society.

Even though Dr. Surana and his experienced team are committed to give their best of service to the patients, like any other hospital or any organization for that matter, this hospital had its own share of issues.

 The waste or inefficiencies were all around. One had to identify the root cause, with focussed effort to come down to the solution and then implement the solution in real hurry. Several tools & concepts of Operational Excellence (OE) like Value Stream Mapping (VSM), Inventory Management, 5S, Visual Management, Standardised Work, Poka Yoke – Error Proofing in Hospitals comes in handy. The concepts remains same, the application changes..!

The hospital team was quick enough to grasp the theme and benefits behind it. Some of the above mentioned concepts were deployed to realize fantastic benefits. The partial depiction is as follows:

As a part of the VSM project conducted at the hospital;

• 40% reduction was noted in average time spent at the OPD
• 20% reduction in average distance covered by the patients
• Space Utilization was increased by 66%

The typical hospital environment sees lot of crowd of patients, the relatives, the staff, trainees, doctors, etc. and the new proposed layout will address the critical issue and help in proper crowd management.

Implementation of OE concepts had reduced number of issues concerning arrangement and management in the hospital such as:

• Improvement in medicine management
• Space allocation reduced by 40%
• Reduction in search time from around 5 minutes to less than a minute
• Reduction in stock taking time
• High standard in house keeping
• Huge savings in inventory carrying cost; inventory of INR 40 Millions ~ 1 MN USD was proposed to be reduced by 50% based on the scientific inventory management module

The transformation projects have shown several tangible benefits and have opened doors for many improvement avenues for the future. The team strongly feels that these above mentioned tangible benefits have paved the road for cultural change and will further improve the team morale, discipline and patient centric efforts.

Faber Infinite has been supporting hospitals in the transformational journey to drive sustainability and improvement culture.

‘Cos at Faber we strongly believe that transformation is the way to go to make a better and efficient healthcare system. Considering in country like India or any developing nation, even today the healthcare is not affordable and distant delusion for the needy.

Today operational excellence is not just a toolset used in manufacturing industry but it is a management system – a philosophy that can change the way hospitals and healthcare industries are managed and organized. ‘Cos for every penny saved, more patients can be treated..!

(Names changed to protect client privacy.)