Covid Testing, Treatment, and Vaccination at Cleveland Clinic: Nate Hurle

Lean Blog Interviews - Healthcare, Manufacturing, Business, and Leadership

Senior Director, Enterprise Continuous Improvement at Cleveland Clinic

Show notes: https://www.leanblog.org/404

My guest for Episode #404 is Nate Hurle, a Senior Director of Enterprise Continuous Improvement at Cleveland Clinic. He was previously a guest on Episode 282. He was also recently a virtual keynote speaker for the Society for Health Systems annual conference.

Today, Nate shares stories and reflections from the past year — the pandemic year — and how Cleveland Clinic quickly stood up drive-thru testing, how they built a 1000-bed hospital (that thankfully wasn't needed), and how they've been ramping up Covid vaccination.

What happened when Nate got a surprise phone call about the need for testing to be up and running “in a few days.” Why was the approach of “get it up and running… then make it better” a useful one and how were mockups and other methods used to put safety first, given the cars and people on foot.

How did they utilize effective standardized work and training methods, huddles, and continuous improvement methods? Why was the question of “What's the most important problem to solve?” such a useful one?

How are they balancing the need for higher throughput with having a patient experience that's not too rushed? How did Cleveland Clinic get so much done in such a short period of time, and what were the lessons learned that could be applied in more normal times? Why is Cleveland Clinic now looking to continuously improve (again) their Cleveland Clinic Improvement Model?

We also chat a bit about their adoption of “Process Behavior Charts” (as I have written about) and we'll talk about that more in a future episode.

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