Case Study: Main Line Health 2024 Achievement Award

Optimal Operations—Large Division

The Systematic Deployment of Rapid Improvement to Improve Emergency Department Throughput

The Goal

Emergency Department crowding, left without being seen (LWBS), and wait times were increasing due to local hospital closures and other factors. Kaizen events were held at four emergency departments with the goal of sourcing improvements from the front-line staff and implementing them immediately.

Intervention

Health system leadership decided drastic/immediate action was needed to alleviate the disastrous consequences of nearby hospital closures affecting all emergency departments, but particularly acute at one specific campus.

Leadership called for the health system’s process improvement department to execute a “Kaizen” in March 2023. A Kaizen is a single-day, in-person process improvement event that focuses on collaborative problem solving and same-day implementation or testing of solutions.

After the first Kaizen, the process improvement team along with Emergency Department steering leadership standardized approximately 80 percent of the event, while 20 percent of the event was customized to each campus’ specific needs.

Results

The results of this initiative achieved drastic improvement at all emergency departments, including a 46 percent reduction in systemwide LWBS since the peak of the crisis.

The results also refined Kaizen as a new process improvement tool. Because of the success, a systemwide strategy for Kaizen deployment was developed and executed, overseen by an interdisciplinary steering team.

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Topics: Quality Initiatives

Revision Date: 2/20/2024

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