Development of a leanness assessment tool for hospitals

The lean philosophy has increasingly been adopted in the healthcare industry to improve the quality of care and reduce costs. However, hospitals are frequently unable to maintain the gains long term. To address this, various authors have stressed that a holistic adoption of lean's principles is a significant contributor to the success and sustainability of its implementation. Thus, there has been a growing focus on developing a way to assess the degree to which the philosophy has been implemented in an organisation. This paper describes the development of a tool to assess the holistic implementation of lean practices in a hospital. The article describes both how the parameters used were determined, as well as the decisions and considerations made for how to assess them.