Lean & safety projects enhancing performances in healthcare processes: three case studies

Affording the current socio-economic contingency and guaranteeing high level of care quality is particularly challenging in healthcare. Through an integrated adoption of emerging managerial solutions, projects that allow achieving both efficiency and patient safety improvements could be implemented, transposing the policy directives towards a more safe and sustainable healthcare system. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the features of three Health Lean Management projects with unexpected patient safety results. Differences and similarities among the cases have been highlighted and relevant conclusions have been grasped. Even if pursuing similar objectives and benefiting from comparable support, the implementation process and the ICT adoption are different, and mostly, the obtained changes impact directly or indirectly on patient safety enhancement.