Quantifying the Patient Experience in Healthcare: One LEAN Expert Calculates Her "Care"'s Value

If your business was facing extinction due to financial and market pressures, and you identified a business process with a 98.3% "waste" output, what would you do? Isolate it? Gather Process People to address it? Align organizational goals - and executive bonuses - to achieving a higher value-add percentage?

Yes. Of course you would. Post-haste. To ignore it would perhaps be seen as criminally negligent by one's board of directors, let alone your consumers.

But this doesn't always, or even usually, happen in healthcare.

I owe the medical system my life for giving me blood when my hemoglobin drops deathly low. But there’s no reason a 4 hour transfusion required 84 hours of negotiation and frustration. There’s no reason that only 4.75% of outpatient visits and .08% of my hospitalizations are spent actively treating my condition. There’s no reason that I spent two solid months (1540 hours, 64.2 days) of this year waiting instead of healing.

Imagine the public outrage if banks simply spent 98% of every dollar you place in their safekeeping.

Beyond the professional frustration I feel when facing the usual institutional and industry inertia and inefficiencies, I am angry.

I am angry because the wonderful woman quoted above recently lost her battle with chronic - and rare - disease.

I am angry because she was 29 years old.

I am angry because she was a healthcare industry insider who faced nothing but obstacles in care delivery and coordination for her complex conditions. 

I am angry because her patient experiences could easily be mistaken for Stephen King novel plots.

Most of all, I am enraged that she spent the last 2 of her scant years on earth literally wasting her precious time in the healthcare system. And she not only knew it: she tracked it, quantified it, and shared the results with the institutions and individuals she visited, in the hopes of informing meaningful change.

Change did not come fast enough for Jess Jacobs. But, thanks to her, these inefficiencies and outrageous wastes - of time, of resources, of life force - are under the renewed scrutiny of thousands of eyes, from senior government officials and healthcare executives down to friends and family.

We must do better. Hell, we must DO.

For full details, including the source of the 1.7% waste and 98.3% value-add process assessment, read Mark Graban's Lean Blog entry, "RIP Jess Jacobs (#UnicornJess): Healthcare System Wasted Her Time, But She Inspires Many to Fix the System."

Mark's post is, itself, a meta-analysis of Jess Jacobs' own blog entry, "On Wasting My Time: The Numbers," quantifying the activities and time spent managing her health, and correlating them to "useful" and "useless" results (AKA, LEAN's "value-add" and "waste" concepts).