If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a million times, patients don’t like to wait. This isn’t exactly new information, but the question remains: How can you improve wait times? Simply changing the name from “The Waiting Room” to “The Reception Area” is not going to help with overall patient flow efficiency.
One of Lean’s five concepts is a push and pull strategy. Most practices operate on a “push” schedule, where the practice makes the patient bend to their timetable, and forces them from one step to the next with maximum effort on the part of the practice which creates wait time for the patient. With a “pull” schedule, the service fits more to the need of the patient through a process with no bottlenecks, lags or gaps. In other words…creating a more efficient patient “flow”. This, of course, should be the goal of every practice. The challenge is getting there.
This Lean-Push-Vs-Pull-Concept article goes deeper into Lean’s push and pull concept and shows how you can take on manufacturing ideals that are perfectly customized to your practice so that you can finally stop pushing, and start pulling.
