Six sigma in health care industry

With articles and stories of Six Sigma affecting businesses and streamlining procedures in more and more industries, the subject continues to eat up in the business world and online as well. Countless companies offering online training are running to put Six Sigma training courses out of sufficient quality, to provide their customers with this increasingly-desired certification.

While this topic is not new, having in its current form immerged in the 1980s, it is only now seeing such popularity due to factors only now present in the business world. Given that with each passing year, any business becomes increasingly complex, and the economy being as cutthroat as it is these days, businesses can’t afford to have problems or inefficiency in anything. So, business professionals are always searching for some new techniques they can implement fairly easily and which will enable them to eliminate inefficiency and quality problems without shutting their business down to rebuild it.

With the job market being as tough as it is, and little room in most careers for promotions, due to people retiring much later in life, working people are also taking to this training with hopes of the certification increasing their value, and therefore potential for promotion, with their employer.

Like anything in this world, though, there are no guarantees, and the effectiveness of this practice depends on the care with which it’s put into place, and upon the skill of the implementer and the workforce it affects.

However, there are countless immerging stories of companies solving very serious issues through proper use of Six Sigma, which also show how diverse it can be by way of fields of industry which can use it.

Two examples of this in the health care industry are Oakwood Retirement Home in Sunnyvale California, and Cirrus Home Health, an in-home care provider for the greater Cincinnati area.

Amelia Collins, who manages Oakwood, would say she had the bigger mess to solve, compared to the problems Cirrus faced, most likely. Ms. Collins has a fairly large facility, with a capacity of over 400 live-in patients that need 24-hour care.

Some of the problems she faced, she was regretful to admit in the interview, were with the behavior of staff towards the patients. Family members would bring patients candies or other consumables, which the patients were allowed to have. On many occasions, younger part-time staff would abscond with portions of the candies or other commodities, when the patients and supervisors weren’t looking.

Another problem she faced was far more severe. During the night shift, when there was a smaller crew on hand, response to emergencies or the typical needs of many patients was less than speedy. Getting ambulances to transport severe cases to an emergency room was a disaster, and on more than one occasion, a patient was lost to an illness before it could be sorted out.

Ms. Collins pointed out at this point that this was a common set of problems that have plagued rest homes for over a century, but she felt something could be done to solve them. After taking her sigma certification, she says it all seemed so obvious to her.

Using the measurement and analysis to look at how her staff flowed and interacted, the behavior of her younger staff was an easy thing to fix. Quite simply, she noticed it was the young part-timers who were the problem, and most of them weren’t committed to a career in health care anyhow. So, she redirected them to technical work in the facility. They began answering phones, working with visitors, doing janitorial work and staffing the kitchen and game rooms instead. This allowed the experienced, committed health care workers to work more one-on-one with the patients in the background, which also benefitted the patients.

As for the bigger issue of night staff and emergency response, this was a little more difficult. Having seen through sigma analysis the structure of a response, and where the major flaws were, she was able to identify what needed changing, but it wasn’t something she could just solve by shifting things around. With a little outside research, she was able to discover private ambulance services that existed for faster responses. While it cost her company a bit to hire one, she was able to get a privately-hired paramedic crew and ambulance to be on the premises during the night shift, which greatly eliminated that issue.

This also freed the night staff up from "watchdog duty" to be able to interact with patients and handle their needs more efficiently. As a result, with quality of living for patients all around elevated in her center, the cost of the ambulance service was more than covered by her increase of business.

Jacob Hildebrand, assistant manager of Cirrus Home Health, has a different success story. His company had a problem with expenses, as keeping in-home workers seven days a week for more severe patients was costly, due to limited human resources.

This isn’t an uncommon problem in his field, he admitted, but after taking a Six Sigma Black Belt course online, he claims the solution hit him like a ton of bricks. The nursing and healthcare industries are among the most sought-after in the medical profession, and people spend quite a bit of time in college and hospital internships earning the experience they need.

Mr. Hildebrand, having seen his company laid out so logically and mathematically with sigma procedures, saw an opportunity to both help his company’s service be more affordable, and help the new generations of health care providers get their wings.

Mr. Hildebrand offered internships, with small stipends, to students of acceptable education, to take up weekend shifts with his company. This allowed his primary staff of care providers to have the days off they really needed, and eliminated their rather costly overtime wages for additional days working.

With the overtime eliminated, his staff enlarged and less stressed, he was able to cut the cost of his service for those who really needed it but had limited financial resources, as well as increasing the quality his care providers could produce, due to them being less frayed.

Oakwood and Cirrus are two smaller examples of Six Sigma’s ability to be adapted to nearly any industry. Only time will tell, though, if this procedure is truly the end-all solution in any industry one can name, but it does seem promising.

Resources-

Countless companies offering online training are running to put Six Sigma training courses out of sufficient quality, to provide their customers with this increasingly-desired certification

The author has been writing about online Six sigma certification courses for more than 3 years. She is skilled when it comes to identifying the right programs that suit the needs of those who would like to learn. She has written numerous articles rel