Felipe Sanchez

A01381567

Mistake-proofing healthcare: Why stopping processes may be a good start

Two of the most significant concerns in healthcare are spiraling costs and medical
errors.

In 1999 the IOM estimated that 44,000 and 98,000 people die each year as result of
medical errors. The solutions to these problems of safety and cost will be a diverse set
of tools that help health-care workers know what to do differently.

The article describes two ways to stop processes that originate in the body of
knowledge know variously as the Toyota Production System, just in time or lean jidoka
and poka yoke.

Toyota has several years with his production system which is characterized by
continuous process improvements via relentless waste reduction. This includes defects,
overproduction, transportation, waiting, inventory, motion and processing. By reducing
this wastes, the firms are able to provide the costumers a service with higher quality ,
they obtain the same output for less input.

But this rising healthcare costs continue to be a concern.

Jidoka and poka-yoke both involve stopping the process. Jidoka involves stopping the
line in order to solve problems by the other hand we have poka yoke stops the process
in order to restore the process to its proper running parameters, or to remove the
causes of defects.

One good example of a physical form of mistake proofing in healthcare is the Blood-
Loc this device provides closure for a plastic bag that contains blood. A patient use one
and its reported to the blood bank, the code is conscientiously omitted from patients
chart and other information systems this system was relly hard to understand because
those who were administering the unit of blood gain acces to it getting the code from
the patient wristband this mean that in that year in a test of 672 transfusion, 3 potential
mistranfusions were avoided by using blood loc.

Several organizations demonstrated that improvement techniques utilized by Toyota

can be employed very effectively in health care, as well as automative manufacturing.

The results of ThedaCare’s Jidoka implementation are impressive as the results of the
blood-lo.

This results achieved at Thedacare demonstrate the financial and medical

improvements that may be obtainable from using these methods.