Arnout Orelio on Lean Thinking in Healthcare: The Netherlands and Beyond

Episode page with video, transcript, and more

Joining us for Episode #479 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Arnout Orelio, a returning guest (from Episode 403 in 2021). He has been working with Lean management since 1995, the last 15 years as a trainer, coach, and consultant in healthcare. 

He is the owner of The Lean Mentor, where he helps people who want to (learn to) improve healthcare. Arnout focuses on teaching lean leadership, as an author, speaker, and mentor, bringing top performance and high levels of productivity within everyone's reach. His mission is to make “more time for better health care.”

His first book was Lean Thinking for Emerging Healthcare Leaders and, today, we're discussing his brand new book, Lean Thinking in Healthcare.

Questions, Notes, and Highlights:

• How do you summarize your 25 years of learning how to improve?
• Creating more time for better healthcare?
• Problem and productivity as dirty words?
• Similarities between Dutch and US health systems / payers?
• What's the general state of healthcare in the Netherlands right now?
• It's hard to manage the work when you don't understand the work
• From the cover — 4 things… do they represent “True North” to you? At your hospital? 
• Right care, right place, right time for the right patient
• Zero Waste – resource efficiency vs flow efficiency?
• How to engage everybody in improvement, every day? Fixing or redesigning the system vs. improving the system?
• Learn to change small systems first
• Cycle of continuous misery?
• Not just what are we moving from, but also what are we moving to?
• What does it mean to “learn from the best” in your experience? The best hospitals? The best organizations?
• Two problems with learning from others?

The podcast is sponsored by Stiles Associates, now in its 30th year of business. They are the go-to Lean recruiting firm serving the manufacturing, private equity, and healthcare industries. Learn more.

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