Quality and Safety Save Healthcare by Saving Costs-Video - Quality and Safety Save Healthcare by Saving Costs

Video Transcription

Video Summary

The webinar, part of Healthcare Quality Week hosted by NACU, features Dr. Nydia Williams (VP of Quality and Safety at Lifespan) presenting “Lean Waste Walk Workout,” a systemwide initiative to reduce healthcare waste while improving quality, safety, patient experience, and employee engagement. Williams explains that waste is any activity that adds no value to the “customer” (often the patient, but also internal users of a process). Using Lean categories summarized as “DOWNTIME” (defects, overcapacity, waiting, not clear, inventory, motion, excess processing), staff were trained to identify non–value-added work and implement changes within 30–60 days.<br /><br />Lifespan deployed the program across all departments, tying improvements to hard-dollar savings tracked by cost center in a centralized database, with finance validation and weekly accountability check-ins. Leaders received a toolkit and ran local “waste walk workouts” led by unit ambassadors; a second phase used cross-department “fresh eyes” teams to find additional opportunities (e.g., vendor contracts, printers, bottled water, and eliminating organization-paid cell phones).<br /><br />Despite some resistance and the challenge of sustaining gains, the first effort exceeded its $4M goal, finding nearly $8M in savings; the follow-on effort identified an additional $17–18M. Key lesson: cut waste, not corners, and make waste reduction a continuous habit rather than a one-time blitz.

Keywords

Healthcare Quality Week webinar

NACU

Dr. Nydia Williams

Lean waste reduction

DOWNTIME waste categories

Waste Walk Workout

quality and patient safety improvement

hard-dollar cost savings tracking

employee engagement and continuous improvement