Abstract
Healthcare is a unique service industry and it deals with complex tasks. To overcome complex tasks, healthcare organizations need to implement DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) approach of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) to improve quality performance. Application of DMAIC in a healthcare organization provides guidelines on how to handle a quality service system toward patient satisfaction. This approach also helps healthcare service providers to reduce waste, variation and work imbalance in the service processes. This chapter discusses five phases of DMAIC approach and its integration with the theory of constraints (TOC) for continuous improvements in healthcare performance. The integration of TOC and DMAIC approach would enhance healthcare performance by reducing medical costs, medical errors, administration errors and defects. Moreover, this integration can improve performance in healthcare service processes where it is not possible to reduce bottlenecks.
Research funding: None declared.
Conflict of interest: Authors state no conflict of interest.
Informed consent: Not applicable.
Ethical approval: The conducted research is not related to either human or animal use.
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