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Information Processing and the Challenges Facing Lean Healthcare
Author(s) -
Kinder Tony,
Burgoyne Trelawney
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
financial accountability and management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.661
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1468-0408
pISSN - 0267-4424
DOI - 10.1111/faam.12016
Subject(s) - perspective (graphical) , health care , unit (ring theory) , lean project management , lean manufacturing , identity (music) , business , information system , knowledge management , process management , operations management , public relations , computer science , psychology , political science , engineering , marketing , physics , mathematics education , artificial intelligence , acoustics , law
Radnor and Walley (2008) and others have identified a high failure rate in NHS lean rapid improvement events. This paper explores one reason why these failures occur: from the perspective of information processing (Galbraith, 1974), it explores the difficulties facing lean healthcare projects. Using qualitative method (pre‐understanding and interviews) with analysis triangulating between data, general theory and sense‐making we investigate two lean projects currently running at a Scottish hospital to identity how the absence of adequate information affects the projects. We find that the projects are critically hampered by the absence of project‐level, inter‐unit level and organisational level information. The practical implications of our research are to suggest that before embarking upon lean projects, hospital leaderships should explore the adequacy and integratedness of their information systems, decision‐taking structures and inter‐unit coordination mechanisms.