How to Create Efficiency in the Booking System with Lean

Lean helps to create efficiency in the booking system and not waste time for gaps between patients. Santiago Luna, Lead Sonographer in PACE Cardiology Clinic explained how Lean helped them to improve processes and allowed doctors to spend more quality time with patients.

“Being the supervisor for the cardiac sonographers I oversee a lot of the testing, the workflow and clinical management of echocardiograms,” says Santiago Luna, Lead Sonographer in PACE Cardiology Clinic. “The process is complex enough, there are limitations on rooms and technologists and machines themselves. So having an optimized workflow is not only crucial but it’s just very beneficial to the patient as well. Having Lean methodology implemented in that workflow has helped us tremendously especially in being more proactive and efficient and as everybody has been trained on the fundamental things of the methodology, everybody starts to speak the same language and actually is leaning out processes trying to cut out any wastes, trying to be more efficient and trying to think of the bigger picture at all times.”

“A lot of what we do is very methodical, picture-taking kind of tests but that is just a piece of the bigger picture,” he continues. “Lean has helped us a lot in recognizing where we’ve been wasting the value of the employees and helped us to be more efficient in the whole process. Specifically, we have been recognizing when and where technologists have non-value-added work and help them find ways and give them projects to actually utilize it through time accordingly whenever there’s a downtime cancellations or no-shows for patients.”

He also said that patients had been giving us feedback and it had been a very clear-cut moment because the Lean implementation had been a clear-cut implementation for the methodology.

“We’ve had a lot of patients that are always coming here for six month or yearly appointments so patients that have been patients of the clinic for a long time have really seen the difference between the before and after of Lean,” explains Santiago Luna. “We’ve gotten very good feedback from patients saying that things are more efficient, patients are more informed since everybody in the clinic knows about Lean, the whole operation actually is more efficient. If the employees know what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, how that affects the whole operation, you can see where the patient can navigate through a whole system of tests and consultation, trying to control the appointments, not feeling lost and actually knowing what the next step is because of all the employees being able to portray that confidently.”

“You cannot fit more patients into one 45-minute spot however you can create that efficiency in the booking system and get more bookings in a day and not have those gaps in between where you cannot ask technologists to do something in particular or you cannot ask them to do another test because it’s too short of a time as well,” he concludes. “So again it’s not for the sonographer taking images but for the operation as a whole to be more efficient and for finding those wasted times or wasted resources and utilizing them a lot for better.”