Part 5 of 6, Full Interview
John S. Toussaint is CEO emeritus of ThedaCare, and CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value. As a strong proponent of applying the lean methodology to rooting out waste across the healthcare industry, we asked John about his experience at ThedaCare, specifically how he measured the return on their lean initiatives.
The mistake that we made collectively as a leadership team was we didn’t realize how difficult this was from the standpoint of our middle management team and physicians in terms of their understanding of what we were trying to do. We didn’t train them, we didn’t mentor them, we didn’t help them through this effectively. So we had to step back and go deep into training and communication.
Halfway through the third year… the actual results were starting to fall off, financially, quality wise, staff morale, [and] physician morale. I think a lot of places would have quit but we had a very supportive board.
You’re trying to transform the organization. When you’re doing that you’re going to go down before you come back up. So you expect that you’re going to have some staff morale going down because you’re radically changing the way that the business is run. We expect the physicians aren’t going to be particularly satisfied because you’re changing their roles and lives. Although the financials didn’t really tank, they certainly leveled off. Our quality results actually continued to improve through all of that time, which was interesting.
This isn’t an isolated unique organization in Northern Wisconsin that’s a bunch of socialists. [Lean is] pervasive across the geography of North America. I just found out last week about a place in Winnipeg that we’ve been working with that now has the lowest cost per weighted case, which is the way they measure efficiency in Canada, in Manitoba. And they’re second in the whole country. They’ve been on the journey now for three years and they’ve seen dramatic improvement year over year in cost per weighted case.
Each week I get more powerful data that shows that the people who are serious and actually successful are driving remarkable results compared to the rest of the industry.
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