ABSTRACT
Are you and your employees treated as first-class customers by your healthcare providers, at a reasonable cost? Patient safety problems, extended wait times, and steeply rising costs are more typical scenarios for many healthcare consumers. This article offers accounts of collaborative improvement initiatives. The remedy for healthcare’s ills is well-known to manufacturing types who set their sights on world-class performance: a consistent, organization-wide focus on quality, complemented by teamwork, standardized performance criteria, information transparency, and perhaps most challenging of all, cultural change.
