At Harbor-UCLA, we have a long tradition of commitment to providing the highest quality of care for the insured as well as the underserved.

Like other healthcare organizations across the country, we are facing multiple challenges with healthcare reform. We now have greater opportunities for increased revenue with more patients obtaining health insurance. However, those same patients have more opportunities than ever before to choose where they will receive their care. There are greater expectations from our patients as well as payers to do more (improve access to care) and do better (improve healthcare processes and outcomes) with less (decrease the cost of healthcare).  As a result of the challenges we face, we simply do not have the luxury of implementing improvements one by one or take the chance of implementing improvements that are not strategically aligned or sustainable.  To support transformative change, we can no longer rely on “good people and smart leaders” utilizing their personal drive, collective experiences and numerous traditional approaches to “make things happen.”

In November 2015, the clinical and administrative leadership at Harbor-UCLA formally adopted the Toyota Production System (TPS), or Lean as it is called in healthcare, as our organizational performance improvement methodology. Lean is a systematic approach that helps us to better understand our processes and seek ways to continue to improve the care and services we provide to our patients. At its core, Lean builds staff engagement expanding capacity for performance improvement that can be used to leverage accelerated and sustainable change throughout our organization.

Lean is built on our guiding principles of patient first, respect for not only our patients but for each other, teamwork and a steadfast commitment to continuous improvement. We recognize that the individuals who do the work understand it best and have the best ideas on how to improve. Our goal as an organization is to create a culture of improvement where every individual sees themselves as a problem solver empowered to make small, incremental improvements each day!

We invite you to explore this website to learn more about Lean and how by working together we can meet our mission to “put patients first and provide exceptional patient-centered care with the compassion and respect we would want for our loved ones, regardless of the ability to pay”.

Warm regards,

Susan Black, MSN, NP

Founder, Kaizen Promotion Office & Former Chief Kaizen (Improvement) Officer