Toyota Motors leads the way in Healthcare

I know I am behind on my posts again, it's been a crazy few weeks so I will attempt to catch up on everything. Last week I had the opportunity to attend the First Annual Johns Hopkins Quality and Safety Improvement Summit. This was an all-day event that had guest speakers from nearly every department in Johns Hopkins with a few special guest speaker with the focus being on of course, Quality and Safety Improvement. The speaker that opened the summit was Peter Pronovost, M.D. he was an incredible speaker and very accomplished Anesthesiologist. Dr. Pronovost was named TIME magazines '100 most influential persons' for the year 2008 in Health care and was also the recipient of the Genius award in 2009. Dr. Pronovost's speech was really thought provoking as he showed us how 15 years ago at Johns Hopkins there were 18 central line infections per 1,000 patients put on a catheter. Granted this number seems really small but the more significant aspect was that about 67% of central line infections resulted in death. To make a long story short, Dr. Pronovost did something drastic he changed the very dynamics of the medical field at Johns Hopkins. First he implemented a 3-step safety check which included: a checklist, independent double checks, and investigation (retrospective). In order to push this process forward Dr. Pronovost and the JHMC staff implemented a system of checks and balances which gave rise to their current interdisciplinary team. No longer were physicians and surgeons the last word on decisions, no longer were they immune to the scrutiny of other health professionals. Under this system physicians, nurses, physician assistants, and pharmacist were required to agree on all decisions concerning patient safety. This system of safety checks and interdisciplinary teams are currently being utilized in the state of Maryland and Michigan with a few hospitals adopting the system in various other states. Dr. Pronovost believed that if all hospitals were to use this system that we could save an additional 20,000 lives per year.
So now lets look at that number in perspective, currently our health care system allows 20,000 preventable deaths per year, just in central line infections. Now taking a step back we all heard in the news a few months ago about the 'Runaway Toyota's' how apparently all of these Camry's and Prius' were accelerating out of control and people were apparently dying left and right. Does anyone know how many people actually died because of the faulty gas pedal? 34. So Toyota Motors is directly responsible for the death of 34 people this year due to poor quality. In fact the government was so upset with Toyota that it slapped the corporation with a $16.4 million dollar fine because of their gross negligence in the area of safety and quality. It almost seems unfair as to how much scrutiny the Toyota Motor representatives went through explaining their lapse in quality yet your local hospital seems somehow immune to the same responsibility.
What's even more ironic is that health systems have been looking at the Toyota model for safety and quality for years to improve their own products. The "Lean" methodology, sometimes called Lean Sigma is an approach to improve quality while reducing costs and it is entirely based on the Toyota Motor Corporations stance on quality improvement. The goal is quite simply, Highest Quality, Lowest Cost, Shortest Lead Time. Amazing how such a simple concept can be applied from the car you drive to the health care you receive.