Learn how Qualis Health's workflow consulting has helped primary care providers streamline their systems:
Sea Mar Community Health Centers (located throughout Washington's I-5 corridor)
Terry Reilly Health Services (southwestern Idaho)
University of Washington Medical Center - Roosevelt (Seattle)
University of Washington Neighborhood Clinics (greater Seattle)
Washington Park Medical Center (Centralia, WA)
Lean methodology calls inefficiencies “waste.” Process mapping is a powerful tool to analyze workflows, expose waste, and guide more efficient design.
Any process can be mapped—but it is important to have staff that actually do the work participate, as they know the details best.
Most process mapping is done in a workshop setting, where team members spend a block of several hours to work through the activity. At the workshop, team members:
While this does require a time investment, the pay-off can be substantial. Benefits of a process-mapping exercise include:
It is highly likely that problems and barriers not directly related to the selected process may come to awareness during the team's discussion. To prevent the team from being sidetracked, record these on a “parking lot” flipchart page for future action planning.
To map the current state, the team identifies all the steps of the process between the agreed-upon beginning and endpoints. During this exercise, participants are often surprised to discover the variability between staff performing the same work, and the redundancies in work performed.
Handwritten sticky notes are convenient to document each step so that everyone can view the entirety. These may later be transferred to a computer program such as Visio. It is desirable to preserve the current-state process map for comparison to the future map(s).
Example Process Map, Created with Handwritten Sticky Notes
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Example Process Map, Created in a Software Program
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After the current-state map is completed, team members can build the desired future-state map, again using discussion and sticky notes. The team's goal is to identify—and attempt to eliminate—as much waste as practical.
In the example lab workflow, the current-state map included 18 steps and was trimmed to just five steps in the future-state version.
Example Future-State Map
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Note:
The illustrations shown on this page were prepared by Qualis Health as part of our work as the Washington & Idaho Regional Extension Center, under grant #90RC0033/01 from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Department of Health and Human Services. 2011