Towards a hospital leanness assessment tool: A review

Abstract

The Lean philosophy is increasingly being applied to the healthcare industry in efforts to improve quality of care and reduce costs. This paper presents a systematic literature review of 48 papers on leanness assessment in order to gain an understanding of the possible approaches for developing a tool for such an assessment for healthcare applications of Lean. It summarises the possible methodologies and characteristics for such a tool, as well as offering a critical analysis of their possible use for the tool. It further classifies a set of core areas for leanness assessment from the data gathered from these papers as a starting point for its development.