Continuous Flow for Healthcare

Tom Jackson, JD, MBA, PhD is the former CEO of Productivity, Inc. and Productivity Press and member of the influential Ford Lean Advisory Group. Tom has been a student of lean enterprise since 1988, when he copyedited Hiroyuki Hirano’s JIT Factory Revolution for Productivity Press and reworked two chapters of Yasuhiro Monden’s groundbreaking Japanese Management Accounting. Looking at pictures of Japanese factories and reading about how differently the Japanese count their money, Tom became so fanatical about lean that he left his comfortable position as a professor of business at the University of Vermont to start his own lean consulting company – in Malaysia! There he learned that the powerful techniques of lean enterprise – JIT, SMED, TPM, kanban, etc. – ere only half the story of Toyota’s great success. The other half of the story was hoshin kanri (aka the “balanced scorecard”) and a revolution in the structure of modern business organization. In 2005, Tom started applying Toyota’s operational and management methods in healthcare in a small rural clinic in Seward, Alaska. In 2008, Tom decided to trade his Levi Dockers for a pair of black scrubs and joined Mike Rona, former President of Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center, as a partner in the Rona Consulting Group, where he and Mike are “transforming healthcare and pursuing perfection.” In 2007, Tom was awarded a Shingo Prize for his book, Hoshin Kanri for the Lean Enterprise.