Assessing the Evidence of Six Sigma and Lean in the Health Care Industry
Item
- Title
- Assessing the Evidence of Six Sigma and Lean in the Health Care Industry
- Abstract/Description
-
Background:
Popular quality improvement tools such as Six Sigma and Lean Systems (SS/L) claim to provide health care managers the opportunity to improve health care quality on the basis of sound methodology and data. However, it is unclear whether these 2 quality improvement tools actually improve health care quality.
Methods:
The authors conducted a comprehensive literature review to assess the empirical evidence relating SS/L to improved clinical outcomes, processes of care, and financial performance of health care organizations.
Results:
The authors identified 177 articles on SS/L published in the last 10 years. However, only 34 of them reported any outcomes of the SS/L projects studied, and less than one-third of these articles included statistical analyses to test for significant changes in outcomes.
Conclusions:
This review demonstrates that there are significant gaps in the SS/L health care quality improvement literature and very weak evidence that SS/L improve health care quality. - Date
- In publication
- Quality Management in Healthcare
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 211
- Resource type
- en Research/Scholarly Media
- Resource status/form
- en Published Text
- Scholarship genre
- en Empirical
- Language
- en-US
- Open access/full-text available
- en No
- Peer reviewed
- en Yes
- ISSN
- 1063-8628
- Citation
- DelliFraine, J. L., Langabeer, J. R. I., & Nembhard, I. M. (2010). Assessing the Evidence of Six Sigma and Lean in the Health Care Industry. Quality Management in Healthcare, 19(3), 211. https://doi.org/10.1097/QMH.0b013e3181eb140e
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