Family Medicine Clinic

Implementation of a LEAN Workflow in a Family Medicine Clinic

The Woodburn Family Medicine clinic for Silverton Health (Currently Legacy Heath – Silverton) is a case study in LEAN planning and design process. We employed appropriate, targeted LEAN tools to help clinic staff and providers analyze flow problems in their existing clinic, and used this analysis in our work with them to develop a new layout based on best practices.

We used a simple LEAN workshop to achieve this with:

· Poster exercise to identify existing problems
· Flow of multiple staff members, patients, information, and materials in the existing clinic
· Flow of those same people and things during design analysis of proposed layouts
· Full-size mock-up of a typical exam room in our office “rapid prototyping workshop”, done in a fast-paced 2-hour meeting

The end result is a clinic that helps staff perform to the best of their abilities to meet the current and future challenges of healthcare delivery.