Lean design improves both health-care facilities and processes: a literature review

Abstract

This article presents a literature review of the challenges and possibilities for Lean design in modern health-care facilities. Many of today's health-care facilities are in dire need of renovation since limited financial resources among health-care demand improved work process efficiency, safety and employee well-being. Lean philosophy has been successfully implemented into hospitals with up-and-running hospital processes, but has not been thoroughly tested as a design methodology. The principles of Lean do not contradict with user-centric, participatory or ergonomic design approaches and thus the possibilities of using Lean as a complementary design methodology to the aforementioned approaches are discussed in this article. Lean fundamentals are also useful when dealing with change management issues. Lean offers a fundamentally solid ideology and a wide range of tools – many of which seem fitting to solve several urgent design problems in today's health-care design.