Finding meaning in ‘Lean’?

 

General background on well-being and burnout

With burnout increasingly recognized as a shared responsibility that requires addressing organizational drivers while supporting individuals to be well,^1-4 practical strategies and examples of successful implementation of systems interventions to address burnout will be helpful for service directors to support their staff. The Charter on Physician Well-being, recently developed through collaborative input from multiple organizations, defines guiding principles and key commitments at the societal, organizational, interpersonal, and individual levels and may be a useful framework for organizations that are developing well-being initiatives.⁵

The charter advocates including physician well-being as a quality improvement metric for health systems, aligned with the concept of the Quadruple Aim of optimizing patient care by enhancing provider experience, promoting high-value care, and improving population health.⁶ Identifying areas of alignment between the charter’s recommendations and systems improvement strategies that seek to optimize efficiency and reduce waste, such as Lean Management, may help physician leaders to contextualize well-being initiatives more easily within ongoing systems improvement efforts. In this perspective, we provide one division’s experience using the Charter to assess successes and identify additional areas of improvement for well-being initiatives developed using Lean Management methodology.
 

Past and current state of affairs

In 2011, the division of hospital medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital was established and has seen continual expansion in terms of direct patient care, medical education, and hospital leadership.

In 2015, the division of hospital medicine experienced leadership transitions, faculty attrition, and insufficient recruitment resulting in staffing shortages, service line closure, schedule instability, and ultimately, low morale. A baseline survey conducted using the 2-Item Maslach Burnout Inventory. This survey, which uses one item in the domain of emotional exhaustion and one item in the domain of depersonalization, has shown good correlation with the full Maslach Burnout Inventory.⁷ At baseline, approximately one-third of the division’s physicians experienced burnout.

In response, a subsequent retreat focused on the three greatest areas of concern identified by the survey: scheduling, faculty development, and well-being.

Like many health systems, the hospital has adopted Lean as its preferred systems-improvement framework. The retreat was structured around the principles of Lean philosophy, and was designed to emulate that of a consolidated Kaizen workshop.

“Kaizen” in Japanese means “change for the better.” A typical Kaizen workshop revolves around rapid problem-solving over the course of 3-5 days, in which a team of people come together to identify and implement significant improvements for a selected process. To this end, the retreat was divided into subgroups for each area of concern. In turn, each subgroup mapped out existing workflows (“value stream”), identified areas of waste and non–value added time, and generated ideas of what an idealized process would be. Next, a root-cause analysis was performed and subsequent interventions (“countermeasures”) developed to address each problem. At the conclusion of the retreat, each subgroup shared a summary of their findings with the larger group.

Moving forward, this information served as a guiding framework for service and division leadership to run small tests of change. We enacted a series of countermeasures over the course of several years, and multiple cycles of improvement work addressed the three areas of concern. We developed an A3 report (a Lean project management tool that incorporates the plan-do-study-act cycle, organizes strategic efforts, and tracks progress on a single page) to summarize and present these initiatives to the Performance Improvement and Patient Safety Committee of the hospital executive leadership team. This structure illustrated alignment with the hospital’s core values (“true north”) of “developing people” and “care experience.”

In 2018, interval surveys demonstrated a gradual reduction of burnout to approximately one-fifth of division physicians as measured by the 2-item Maslach Burnout Inventory.
 

 

Initiatives in faculty well-being

The Charter of Physician Well-being outlines a framework to promote well-being among doctors by maximizing a sense of fulfillment and minimizing the harms of burnout. It shares this responsibility among societal, organizational, and interpersonal and individual commitments.⁵

As illustrated above, we used principles of Lean Management to prospectively create initiatives to improve well-being in our division. Lean in health care is designed to optimize primarily the patient experience; its implementation has subsequently demonstrated mixed provider and staff experiences,^8,9 and many providers are skeptical of Lean’s potential to improve their own well-being. If, however, Lean is aligned with best practice frameworks for well-being such as those outline in the charter, it may also help to meet the Quadruple Aim of optimizing both provider well-being and patient experience. To further test this hypothesis, we retrospectively categorized our Lean-based interventions into the commitments described by the charter to identify areas of alignment and gaps that were not initially addressed using Lean Management (Table).
 

Organizational commitments⁵Supportive systems

We optimized scheduling and enhanced physician staffing by budgeting for a physician staffing buffer each academic year in order to minimize mandatory moonlighting and jeopardy pool activations that result from operating on a thin staffing margin when expected personal leave and reductions in clinical effort occur. Furthermore, we revised scheduling principles to balance patient continuity and individual time off requests while setting limits on the maximum duration of clinical stretches and instituting mandatory minimum time off between them.

Leadership engagement

We initiated monthly operations meetings as a forum to discuss challenges, brainstorm solutions, and message new initiatives with group input. For example, as a result of these meetings, we designed and implemented an additional service line to address the high census, revised the distribution of new patient admissions to level-load clinical shifts, and established a maximum number of weekends worked per month and year. This approach aligns with recommendations to use participatory leadership strategies to enhance physician well-being.¹⁰ Engaging both executive level and service level management to focus on burnout and other related well-being metrics is necessary for sustaining such work.

Interprofessional teamwork

We revised multidisciplinary rounds with social work, utilization management, and physical therapy to maximize efficiency and streamline communication by developing standard approaches for each patient presentation.

Interpersonal and individual commitments⁵Address emotional challenges of physician work

Although these commitments did not have a direct corollary with Lean philosophy, some of these needs were identified by our physician group at our annual retreats. As a result, we initiated a monthly faculty-led noon conference series focused on the clinical challenges of caring for vulnerable populations, a particular source of distress in our practice setting, and revised the division schedule to encourage attendance at the hospital’s Schwartz rounds.

Mental health and self-care

We organized focus groups and faculty development sessions on provider well-being and burnout and dealing with challenging patients and invited the Faculty and Staff Assistance Program, our institution’s mental health service provider, to our weekly division meeting.

 

Future directions

After using Lean Management as an approach to prospectively improve physician well-being, we were able to use the Charter on Physician Well-being retrospectively as a “checklist” to identify additional gaps for targeted intervention to ensure all commitments are sufficiently addressed.

Overall, we found that, not surprisingly, Lean Management aligned best with the organizational commitments in the charter. Reviewing the organizational commitments, we found our biggest remaining challenges are in building supportive systems, namely ensuring sustainable workloads, offloading and delegating nonphysician tasks, and minimizing the burden of documentation and administration.

Reviewing the societal commitments helped us to identify opportunities for future directions that we may not have otherwise considered. As a safety-net institution, we benefit from a strong sense of mission and shared values within our hospital and division. However, we recognize the need to continue to be vigilant to ensure that our physicians perceive that their own values are aligned with the division’s stated mission. Devoting a Kaizen-style retreat to well-being likely helped, and allocating divisional resources to a well-being committee indirectly helped, to foster a culture of well-being; however, we could more deliberately identify local policies that may benefit from advocacy or revision. Although our faculty identified interventions to improve interpersonal and individual drivers of well-being, these charter commitments did not have direct parallels in Lean philosophy, and organizations may need to deliberately seek to address these commitments outside of a Lean approach. Specifically, by reviewing the charter, we identified opportunities to provide additional resources for peer support and protected time for mental health care and self-care.

Conclusion

Lean Management can be an effective strategy to address many of the organizational commitments outlined in the Charter on Physician Well-being. This approach may be particularly effective for solving local challenges with systems and workflows. Those who use Lean as a primary method to approach systems improvement in support of the Quadruple Aim may need to use additional strategies to address societal and interpersonal and individual commitments outlined in the charter.

Dr. Sanyal-Dey is visiting associate clinical professor of medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and director of client services, LeanTaaS. Dr. Thomas is associate clinical professor of medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Dr. Chia is associate professor of clinical medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

References

1. West CP et al. Interventions to prevent and reduce physician burnout: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Lancet. 2016;388(10057):2272-81.

2. Shanafelt TD, Noseworthy JH. Executive leadership and physician: Nine organizational strategies to promote engagement and reduce burnout. Mayo Clin Proc. 2017;92(1):129-46.

3. Shanafelt T et al. The business case for investing in physician well-being. JAMA Intern Med. 2017;177(12):1826-32.

4. Shanafelt T et al. Building a program on well-being: Key design considerations to meet the unique needs of each organization. Acad Med. 2019 Feb;94(2):156-161.

5. Thomas LR et al. Charter on physician well-being. JAMA. 2018;319(15):1541-42.

6. Bodenheimer T, Sinsky C. From triple to quadruple aim: Care of the patient requires care of the provider. Ann Fam Med. 2014;12(6):573-6.

7. West CP et al. Concurrent Validity of Single-Item Measures of Emotional Exhaustion and Depersonalization in Burnout Assessment. J Gen Intern Med. 2012;27(11):1445-52.

8. Hung DY et al. Experiences of primary care physicians and staff following lean workflow redesign. BMC Health Serv Res. 2018 Apr 10;18(1):274.

9. Zibrowski E et al. Easier and faster is not always better: Grounded theory of the impact of large-scale system transformation on the clinical work of emergency medicine nurses and physicians. JMIR Hum Factors. 2018. doi: 10.2196/11013.

10. Shanafelt TD et al. Impact of organizational leadership on physician burnout and satisfaction. Mayo Clin Proc. 2015;90(4):432-40.


 

 

General background on well-being and burnout

With burnout increasingly recognized as a shared responsibility that requires addressing organizational drivers while supporting individuals to be well,^1-4 practical strategies and examples of successful implementation of systems interventions to address burnout will be helpful for service directors to support their staff. The Charter on Physician Well-being, recently developed through collaborative input from multiple organizations, defines guiding principles and key commitments at the societal, organizational, interpersonal, and individual levels and may be a useful framework for organizations that are developing well-being initiatives.⁵

The charter advocates including physician well-being as a quality improvement metric for health systems, aligned with the concept of the Quadruple Aim of optimizing patient care by enhancing provider experience, promoting high-value care, and improving population health.⁶ Identifying areas of alignment between the charter’s recommendations and systems improvement strategies that seek to optimize efficiency and reduce waste, such as Lean Management, may help physician leaders to contextualize well-being initiatives more easily within ongoing systems improvement efforts. In this perspective, we provide one division’s experience using the Charter to assess successes and identify additional areas of improvement for well-being initiatives developed using Lean Management methodology.
 

Past and current state of affairs

In 2011, the division of hospital medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital was established and has seen continual expansion in terms of direct patient care, medical education, and hospital leadership.

In 2015, the division of hospital medicine experienced leadership transitions, faculty attrition, and insufficient recruitment resulting in staffing shortages, service line closure, schedule instability, and ultimately, low morale. A baseline survey conducted using the 2-Item Maslach Burnout Inventory. This survey, which uses one item in the domain of emotional exhaustion and one item in the domain of depersonalization, has shown good correlation with the full Maslach Burnout Inventory.⁷ At baseline, approximately one-third of the division’s physicians experienced burnout.

In response, a subsequent retreat focused on the three greatest areas of concern identified by the survey: scheduling, faculty development, and well-being.

Like many health systems, the hospital has adopted Lean as its preferred systems-improvement framework. The retreat was structured around the principles of Lean philosophy, and was designed to emulate that of a consolidated Kaizen workshop.

“Kaizen” in Japanese means “change for the better.” A typical Kaizen workshop revolves around rapid problem-solving over the course of 3-5 days, in which a team of people come together to identify and implement significant improvements for a selected process. To this end, the retreat was divided into subgroups for each area of concern. In turn, each subgroup mapped out existing workflows (“value stream”), identified areas of waste and non–value added time, and generated ideas of what an idealized process would be. Next, a root-cause analysis was performed and subsequent interventions (“countermeasures”) developed to address each problem. At the conclusion of the retreat, each subgroup shared a summary of their findings with the larger group.

Moving forward, this information served as a guiding framework for service and division leadership to run small tests of change. We enacted a series of countermeasures over the course of several years, and multiple cycles of improvement work addressed the three areas of concern. We developed an A3 report (a Lean project management tool that incorporates the plan-do-study-act cycle, organizes strategic efforts, and tracks progress on a single page) to summarize and present these initiatives to the Performance Improvement and Patient Safety Committee of the hospital executive leadership team. This structure illustrated alignment with the hospital’s core values (“true north”) of “developing people” and “care experience.”

In 2018, interval surveys demonstrated a gradual reduction of burnout to approximately one-fifth of division physicians as measured by the 2-item Maslach Burnout Inventory.
 

 

Initiatives in faculty well-being

The Charter of Physician Well-being outlines a framework to promote well-being among doctors by maximizing a sense of fulfillment and minimizing the harms of burnout. It shares this responsibility among societal, organizational, and interpersonal and individual commitments.⁵

As illustrated above, we used principles of Lean Management to prospectively create initiatives to improve well-being in our division. Lean in health care is designed to optimize primarily the patient experience; its implementation has subsequently demonstrated mixed provider and staff experiences,^8,9 and many providers are skeptical of Lean’s potential to improve their own well-being. If, however, Lean is aligned with best practice frameworks for well-being such as those outline in the charter, it may also help to meet the Quadruple Aim of optimizing both provider well-being and patient experience. To further test this hypothesis, we retrospectively categorized our Lean-based interventions into the commitments described by the charter to identify areas of alignment and gaps that were not initially addressed using Lean Management (Table).
 

Organizational commitments⁵Supportive systems

We optimized scheduling and enhanced physician staffing by budgeting for a physician staffing buffer each academic year in order to minimize mandatory moonlighting and jeopardy pool activations that result from operating on a thin staffing margin when expected personal leave and reductions in clinical effort occur. Furthermore, we revised scheduling principles to balance patient continuity and individual time off requests while setting limits on the maximum duration of clinical stretches and instituting mandatory minimum time off between them.

Leadership engagement

We initiated monthly operations meetings as a forum to discuss challenges, brainstorm solutions, and message new initiatives with group input. For example, as a result of these meetings, we designed and implemented an additional service line to address the high census, revised the distribution of new patient admissions to level-load clinical shifts, and established a maximum number of weekends worked per month and year. This approach aligns with recommendations to use participatory leadership strategies to enhance physician well-being.¹⁰ Engaging both executive level and service level management to focus on burnout and other related well-being metrics is necessary for sustaining such work.

Interprofessional teamwork

We revised multidisciplinary rounds with social work, utilization management, and physical therapy to maximize efficiency and streamline communication by developing standard approaches for each patient presentation.

Interpersonal and individual commitments⁵Address emotional challenges of physician work

Although these commitments did not have a direct corollary with Lean philosophy, some of these needs were identified by our physician group at our annual retreats. As a result, we initiated a monthly faculty-led noon conference series focused on the clinical challenges of caring for vulnerable populations, a particular source of distress in our practice setting, and revised the division schedule to encourage attendance at the hospital’s Schwartz rounds.

Mental health and self-care

We organized focus groups and faculty development sessions on provider well-being and burnout and dealing with challenging patients and invited the Faculty and Staff Assistance Program, our institution’s mental health service provider, to our weekly division meeting.

 

Future directions

After using Lean Management as an approach to prospectively improve physician well-being, we were able to use the Charter on Physician Well-being retrospectively as a “checklist” to identify additional gaps for targeted intervention to ensure all commitments are sufficiently addressed.

Overall, we found that, not surprisingly, Lean Management aligned best with the organizational commitments in the charter. Reviewing the organizational commitments, we found our biggest remaining challenges are in building supportive systems, namely ensuring sustainable workloads, offloading and delegating nonphysician tasks, and minimizing the burden of documentation and administration.

Reviewing the societal commitments helped us to identify opportunities for future directions that we may not have otherwise considered. As a safety-net institution, we benefit from a strong sense of mission and shared values within our hospital and division. However, we recognize the need to continue to be vigilant to ensure that our physicians perceive that their own values are aligned with the division’s stated mission. Devoting a Kaizen-style retreat to well-being likely helped, and allocating divisional resources to a well-being committee indirectly helped, to foster a culture of well-being; however, we could more deliberately identify local policies that may benefit from advocacy or revision. Although our faculty identified interventions to improve interpersonal and individual drivers of well-being, these charter commitments did not have direct parallels in Lean philosophy, and organizations may need to deliberately seek to address these commitments outside of a Lean approach. Specifically, by reviewing the charter, we identified opportunities to provide additional resources for peer support and protected time for mental health care and self-care.

Conclusion

Lean Management can be an effective strategy to address many of the organizational commitments outlined in the Charter on Physician Well-being. This approach may be particularly effective for solving local challenges with systems and workflows. Those who use Lean as a primary method to approach systems improvement in support of the Quadruple Aim may need to use additional strategies to address societal and interpersonal and individual commitments outlined in the charter.

Dr. Sanyal-Dey is visiting associate clinical professor of medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and director of client services, LeanTaaS. Dr. Thomas is associate clinical professor of medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Dr. Chia is associate professor of clinical medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

References

1. West CP et al. Interventions to prevent and reduce physician burnout: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Lancet. 2016;388(10057):2272-81.

2. Shanafelt TD, Noseworthy JH. Executive leadership and physician: Nine organizational strategies to promote engagement and reduce burnout. Mayo Clin Proc. 2017;92(1):129-46.

3. Shanafelt T et al. The business case for investing in physician well-being. JAMA Intern Med. 2017;177(12):1826-32.

4. Shanafelt T et al. Building a program on well-being: Key design considerations to meet the unique needs of each organization. Acad Med. 2019 Feb;94(2):156-161.

5. Thomas LR et al. Charter on physician well-being. JAMA. 2018;319(15):1541-42.

6. Bodenheimer T, Sinsky C. From triple to quadruple aim: Care of the patient requires care of the provider. Ann Fam Med. 2014;12(6):573-6.

7. West CP et al. Concurrent Validity of Single-Item Measures of Emotional Exhaustion and Depersonalization in Burnout Assessment. J Gen Intern Med. 2012;27(11):1445-52.

8. Hung DY et al. Experiences of primary care physicians and staff following lean workflow redesign. BMC Health Serv Res. 2018 Apr 10;18(1):274.

9. Zibrowski E et al. Easier and faster is not always better: Grounded theory of the impact of large-scale system transformation on the clinical work of emergency medicine nurses and physicians. JMIR Hum Factors. 2018. doi: 10.2196/11013.

10. Shanafelt TD et al. Impact of organizational leadership on physician burnout and satisfaction. Mayo Clin Proc. 2015;90(4):432-40.


 

 

General background on well-being and burnout

With burnout increasingly recognized as a shared responsibility that requires addressing organizational drivers while supporting individuals to be well,^1-4 practical strategies and examples of successful implementation of systems interventions to address burnout will be helpful for service directors to support their staff. The Charter on Physician Well-being, recently developed through collaborative input from multiple organizations, defines guiding principles and key commitments at the societal, organizational, interpersonal, and individual levels and may be a useful framework for organizations that are developing well-being initiatives.⁵

The charter advocates including physician well-being as a quality improvement metric for health systems, aligned with the concept of the Quadruple Aim of optimizing patient care by enhancing provider experience, promoting high-value care, and improving population health.⁶ Identifying areas of alignment between the charter’s recommendations and systems improvement strategies that seek to optimize efficiency and reduce waste, such as Lean Management, may help physician leaders to contextualize well-being initiatives more easily within ongoing systems improvement efforts. In this perspective, we provide one division’s experience using the Charter to assess successes and identify additional areas of improvement for well-being initiatives developed using Lean Management methodology.
 

Past and current state of affairs

In 2011, the division of hospital medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital was established and has seen continual expansion in terms of direct patient care, medical education, and hospital leadership.

In 2015, the division of hospital medicine experienced leadership transitions, faculty attrition, and insufficient recruitment resulting in staffing shortages, service line closure, schedule instability, and ultimately, low morale. A baseline survey conducted using the 2-Item Maslach Burnout Inventory. This survey, which uses one item in the domain of emotional exhaustion and one item in the domain of depersonalization, has shown good correlation with the full Maslach Burnout Inventory.⁷ At baseline, approximately one-third of the division’s physicians experienced burnout.

In response, a subsequent retreat focused on the three greatest areas of concern identified by the survey: scheduling, faculty development, and well-being.

Like many health systems, the hospital has adopted Lean as its preferred systems-improvement framework. The retreat was structured around the principles of Lean philosophy, and was designed to emulate that of a consolidated Kaizen workshop.

“Kaizen” in Japanese means “change for the better.” A typical Kaizen workshop revolves around rapid problem-solving over the course of 3-5 days, in which a team of people come together to identify and implement significant improvements for a selected process. To this end, the retreat was divided into subgroups for each area of concern. In turn, each subgroup mapped out existing workflows (“value stream”), identified areas of waste and non–value added time, and generated ideas of what an idealized process would be. Next, a root-cause analysis was performed and subsequent interventions (“countermeasures”) developed to address each problem. At the conclusion of the retreat, each subgroup shared a summary of their findings with the larger group.

Moving forward, this information served as a guiding framework for service and division leadership to run small tests of change. We enacted a series of countermeasures over the course of several years, and multiple cycles of improvement work addressed the three areas of concern. We developed an A3 report (a Lean project management tool that incorporates the plan-do-study-act cycle, organizes strategic efforts, and tracks progress on a single page) to summarize and present these initiatives to the Performance Improvement and Patient Safety Committee of the hospital executive leadership team. This structure illustrated alignment with the hospital’s core values (“true north”) of “developing people” and “care experience.”

In 2018, interval surveys demonstrated a gradual reduction of burnout to approximately one-fifth of division physicians as measured by the 2-item Maslach Burnout Inventory.
 

 

Initiatives in faculty well-being

The Charter of Physician Well-being outlines a framework to promote well-being among doctors by maximizing a sense of fulfillment and minimizing the harms of burnout. It shares this responsibility among societal, organizational, and interpersonal and individual commitments.⁵

As illustrated above, we used principles of Lean Management to prospectively create initiatives to improve well-being in our division. Lean in health care is designed to optimize primarily the patient experience; its implementation has subsequently demonstrated mixed provider and staff experiences,^8,9 and many providers are skeptical of Lean’s potential to improve their own well-being. If, however, Lean is aligned with best practice frameworks for well-being such as those outline in the charter, it may also help to meet the Quadruple Aim of optimizing both provider well-being and patient experience. To further test this hypothesis, we retrospectively categorized our Lean-based interventions into the commitments described by the charter to identify areas of alignment and gaps that were not initially addressed using Lean Management (Table).
 

Organizational commitments⁵Supportive systems

We optimized scheduling and enhanced physician staffing by budgeting for a physician staffing buffer each academic year in order to minimize mandatory moonlighting and jeopardy pool activations that result from operating on a thin staffing margin when expected personal leave and reductions in clinical effort occur. Furthermore, we revised scheduling principles to balance patient continuity and individual time off requests while setting limits on the maximum duration of clinical stretches and instituting mandatory minimum time off between them.

Leadership engagement

We initiated monthly operations meetings as a forum to discuss challenges, brainstorm solutions, and message new initiatives with group input. For example, as a result of these meetings, we designed and implemented an additional service line to address the high census, revised the distribution of new patient admissions to level-load clinical shifts, and established a maximum number of weekends worked per month and year. This approach aligns with recommendations to use participatory leadership strategies to enhance physician well-being.¹⁰ Engaging both executive level and service level management to focus on burnout and other related well-being metrics is necessary for sustaining such work.

Interprofessional teamwork

We revised multidisciplinary rounds with social work, utilization management, and physical therapy to maximize efficiency and streamline communication by developing standard approaches for each patient presentation.

Interpersonal and individual commitments⁵Address emotional challenges of physician work

Although these commitments did not have a direct corollary with Lean philosophy, some of these needs were identified by our physician group at our annual retreats. As a result, we initiated a monthly faculty-led noon conference series focused on the clinical challenges of caring for vulnerable populations, a particular source of distress in our practice setting, and revised the division schedule to encourage attendance at the hospital’s Schwartz rounds.

Mental health and self-care

We organized focus groups and faculty development sessions on provider well-being and burnout and dealing with challenging patients and invited the Faculty and Staff Assistance Program, our institution’s mental health service provider, to our weekly division meeting.

 

Future directions

After using Lean Management as an approach to prospectively improve physician well-being, we were able to use the Charter on Physician Well-being retrospectively as a “checklist” to identify additional gaps for targeted intervention to ensure all commitments are sufficiently addressed.

Overall, we found that, not surprisingly, Lean Management aligned best with the organizational commitments in the charter. Reviewing the organizational commitments, we found our biggest remaining challenges are in building supportive systems, namely ensuring sustainable workloads, offloading and delegating nonphysician tasks, and minimizing the burden of documentation and administration.

Reviewing the societal commitments helped us to identify opportunities for future directions that we may not have otherwise considered. As a safety-net institution, we benefit from a strong sense of mission and shared values within our hospital and division. However, we recognize the need to continue to be vigilant to ensure that our physicians perceive that their own values are aligned with the division’s stated mission. Devoting a Kaizen-style retreat to well-being likely helped, and allocating divisional resources to a well-being committee indirectly helped, to foster a culture of well-being; however, we could more deliberately identify local policies that may benefit from advocacy or revision. Although our faculty identified interventions to improve interpersonal and individual drivers of well-being, these charter commitments did not have direct parallels in Lean philosophy, and organizations may need to deliberately seek to address these commitments outside of a Lean approach. Specifically, by reviewing the charter, we identified opportunities to provide additional resources for peer support and protected time for mental health care and self-care.

Conclusion

Lean Management can be an effective strategy to address many of the organizational commitments outlined in the Charter on Physician Well-being. This approach may be particularly effective for solving local challenges with systems and workflows. Those who use Lean as a primary method to approach systems improvement in support of the Quadruple Aim may need to use additional strategies to address societal and interpersonal and individual commitments outlined in the charter.

Dr. Sanyal-Dey is visiting associate clinical professor of medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and director of client services, LeanTaaS. Dr. Thomas is associate clinical professor of medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Dr. Chia is associate professor of clinical medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

References

1. West CP et al. Interventions to prevent and reduce physician burnout: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Lancet. 2016;388(10057):2272-81.

2. Shanafelt TD, Noseworthy JH. Executive leadership and physician: Nine organizational strategies to promote engagement and reduce burnout. Mayo Clin Proc. 2017;92(1):129-46.

3. Shanafelt T et al. The business case for investing in physician well-being. JAMA Intern Med. 2017;177(12):1826-32.

4. Shanafelt T et al. Building a program on well-being: Key design considerations to meet the unique needs of each organization. Acad Med. 2019 Feb;94(2):156-161.

5. Thomas LR et al. Charter on physician well-being. JAMA. 2018;319(15):1541-42.

6. Bodenheimer T, Sinsky C. From triple to quadruple aim: Care of the patient requires care of the provider. Ann Fam Med. 2014;12(6):573-6.

7. West CP et al. Concurrent Validity of Single-Item Measures of Emotional Exhaustion and Depersonalization in Burnout Assessment. J Gen Intern Med. 2012;27(11):1445-52.

8. Hung DY et al. Experiences of primary care physicians and staff following lean workflow redesign. BMC Health Serv Res. 2018 Apr 10;18(1):274.

9. Zibrowski E et al. Easier and faster is not always better: Grounded theory of the impact of large-scale system transformation on the clinical work of emergency medicine nurses and physicians. JMIR Hum Factors. 2018. doi: 10.2196/11013.

10. Shanafelt TD et al. Impact of organizational leadership on physician burnout and satisfaction. Mayo Clin Proc. 2015;90(4):432-40.