By Minda Zetlin

Dee Cantrell, CIO of Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, recently spent some time in a medical practice's waiting room. Cantrell wasn't sick. She and members of her IT staff wanted to observe how the practice's staff scheduled patient appointments and procedures. "We did this eight hours a day for a week," she says. "We watched the workflow, so that we understood every step, and we wrote each step on a yellow sticky note." At the end of the week, Cantrell and her team lined up the notes, in order, on a conference room wall. By the time they were finished, the notes snaked around all four walls.

"There are an extremely large number of steps in the scheduling process," she says, "and there were a lot of wasted steps." For example, when Cantrell asked "What happens to the output you create in that step?" the staff replied, "We put it in a folder." Next, she asked, "What happens to the folder?" Back came the reply: "Nothing." Then, in a second session, she asked: "What should the workflow look like?" and mapped that out, too. "Combined, the two sessions helped us see where there were opportunities to use technology and make processes more efficient," says Cantrell.

Cantrell is one of several employees of Atlanta-based Emory Healthcare who are certified in the Lean methodology, which was developed by Toyota in the 1950s to eliminate waste and increase efficiency at its plants. These days, IT departments facing budget cuts that force them to do more with less are finding that Lean can help them as well. Cantrell's project, which will eventually take her team to offices in all 28 medical specialties within Emory, is one such example. The streamlining of scheduling workflow will improve throughput, provide a better patient experience and help both front desk staff and physicians do their jobs more easily, says Cantrell. "That's where business benefits drive the requirements for technology."