By Diane Miller, Executive Director, Virginia Mason Institute

Introducing the Virginia Mason Institute Team to Our Blog

Diane Miller

I’d like to introduce the Virginia Mason Institute team to readers. In the coming months, more faculty members will be featured on the Virginia Mason blog, sharing their experience and explaining the ways that lean concepts can successfully be used in health care. A collection of lean thinkers and teachers, rigorously trained in the Virginia Mason Production System (VMPS), the team officially began transforming health care in organizations outside Virginia Mason in 2008. Today’s team comes with a variety of skills—in ambulatory flow, primary care and specialty medicine, nursing, patient safety, lean financial processes, lean architecture, and kaizen promotion—and they enjoy being lifelong learners and teachers.

Through the years, we’ve grown in number and in scope, so that now we’re training leaders on site in the United States, United Kingdom, Denmark and more. In our classrooms in Seattle, we’re training leaders from Maine to California, from the Netherlands to Japan and from Iceland to Brazil. In every one of our courses, we’re asking providers and organizations, one by one, to learn from Virginia Mason’s successes and failures and find the courage to change the culture and put patients first in all that they do.

Why is change necessary?

Change, as we know from experience, can be a rough road to travel. Health care providers naturally want to provide the best care, at all times, to their patients. Asking them to change processes may seem foreign or unnecessary—something they and their colleagues don’t have time for. But we know from years of experience that using Virginia Mason Production System tools and a new management method can not only change the way an organization operates, but also dramatically alter the patient and staff experience in a positive way. With the concept of continuous improvement embedded in our culture, we know that change can energize and motivate providers—providing multiple opportunities for innovation, teamwork and accomplishments that weren’t possible with an old management system.

Virginia Mason Institute team members
in our new training facility

Here at Virginia Mason Institute, we’re undergoing a new change of our own as we take our model of continuous improvement to heart. First, based on feedback from attendees at our classes in Seattle, we’re building new classrooms. With seating arrangements that allow for more teambuilding, windows that allow natural light in all the spaces, corridors that enable thoughtful time between sessions and streamlined check-in processes and refreshment stands, the new space will better serve the national and international clientele who travel here to learn from and engage with us.

We’re also updating our courses to incorporate new case studies and simulation exercises to help the lean concepts we teach continue to powerfully resonate with health care providers and leaders. In every class, we pledge to deliver an extraordinary learning experience and be sure attendees leave with a greater capacity to reduce waste, improve patient safety and increase patient and staff satisfaction. All of our work is exciting to us, and this feeds our mission to energize and motivate health care teams around the world.

What to look forward to

In addition to introducing new voices to our blog and opening new classrooms, this year we’ll be redesigning our website and debuting more ways to interact with us on social media. We want you to learn from the lean journey that we have experienced for more than a decade and that we continue to experience every day. Our enthusiasm for transforming health care knows no bounds, and we’re proud to develop more and more connections to the broader community that wants to transform health care, too. Please connect with us to let us know what you’d like to see—in the blog, in our classrooms, in our courses—as we work to continuously improve the learning journey.