Lean healthcare - The hunt for new performance indicators in the Swedish healthcare system.

Authors:

Tina Sjögren, Henrik Weimarsson, Dan Högfelt

Supervisor:

Jan Alpenberg

Keywords:

Lean healthcare, the Swedish healthcare system, performance indicators, expansion of Lean healthcare,

Background:

According to several articles in healthcare connected magazines Lean healthcare is expanding rapidly in the Swedish healthcare system. Many of the key figures behind Lean thinking also stress the importance of Lean accounting to match the new production style. With this as a background we chose to research the expansion of Lean healthcare in the Swedish healthcare system. We also chose to research to what degree the implementation brought a change to the performance indicators and if Lean healthcare has been implemented as a philosophy or a management control system.

Purpose:

The purpose of our research is to: 1. establish the degree of expansion of Lean healthcare in the Swedish healthcare system, 2. to establish if Lean healthcare is implemented as a management control system or as a philosophy and 3. to find out if the implementation of Lean has brought new performance indicators.

Methodology:

While doing our research we have used an abductive research approach. We have researched, learnt and gained ideas from articles, theses, literature and seminars, from this we established 3 hypotheses that we put to test with a survey. We conducted a quantitative survey that stretched over 4 weeks, where we approached appropriate staff at every public hospital in Sweden. When the results of our survey and our studies of secondary sources were finished we accepted and/or discarded our initial hypotheses.

Conclusion:

Our survey stretched over 4 weeks in April 2011 and we got a 64 percent answer rate. The survey showed that 90 percent of the hospitals work with Lean to some degree, within the hospitals the average degree of Lean implementation is 47 percent and the average time the hospitals have been working with Lean is 2.6 years. The survey also shows that there is a strong relation between the time the hospital has worked with Lean and the degree of implementation within the hospital. About half of the hospitals have adopted new performance indicators when implementing Lean and most of the hospitals indicate a need for more new performance indicators. As to the purpose of our research, we would like to claim that Lean healthcare is already widespread and is still expanding in Sweden. The first hypothesis is accepted. When it comes to the second hypothesis we discard it. Lean is not used as a philosophy before a management system. Lean is used as both a philosophy and a management system. The third hypothesis is discarded. There are not just a few hospitals that have implemented new performance indicators.