Lean Readiness Index for Malaysian Hospitals: An Exploratory Study

This paper presents an exploratory study on the development of lean readiness index for Malaysian hospitals. A questionnaire survey were obtained from 118 public hospitals and lean readiness model was developed using structural equation modeling (SEM) and the relevant constructs were identified using confirmatory factor analysis. The Lean Readiness Index (LRI) is formulated and a ruler in associate with the LRI were proposed as to meet the objective of the study. The finding to emerge from this study is that only 10.1% of Malaysian public hospitals have ‘good’ readiness status. The study also revealed the overall LRI’s value is 0.617 and, the majority of the hospitals were categorize as having ‘fair’ and ‘weak’ readiness status. The result indicated that training had the strongest association towards lean readiness while communication is the least. This study had revealed the readiness level for lean implementation in Malaysian public hospitals and proposed the required foundation that need to be enhanced before implementing lean.