Discovery of value streams for Lean Healthcare

In recent years there has been considerable interest in the possibility of improving healthcare by using ideas from manufacturing and engineering, such as lean thinking. In this paper we describe a lean systems framework for healthcare improvement, where we propose to discover high-level patient pathways using a Markov phase-type model that employs readily available, patient administrative data. Such models can be used to identify major patient pathways and Lean value streams as clusters. The ideas are illustrated using a case study for emergency patient care and a case study for stroke patients.