Human Factors in an Agile Environment: Capturing Value in Healthcare

Increasingly, healthcare systems seem to be turning to management practices and tools used in manufacturing and software industries, including lean, to structure process improvement. They focus on identifying waste and delay to reduce bottlenecks and improve flow. There are, however, challenges to deploying such tools and methods in a healthcare environment. Expanding the ways we consider attributes such as value and waste and utilizing human factors methods to better understand how people are functioning in the system can assist with the translation of these manufacturing ideas into healthcare domains. By describing different types of value, including value associated with patient-centered care and resilient behavior, we were able to better capture important functionality of the healthcare system. We illustrate the importance of explicitly considering different types of value people may add to a system by examining the activities around delivering gastrointestinal (GI) specialty care to patients via referrals from primary care providers (PCPs). These expanded ways of looking at value and methods for understanding the activities of people within systems can contribute to better comprehension of systems and support more effective process improvement methods.