Background and Aim: The growing healthcare expenses, technological advancements and increasing competition in healthcare services, brings up new challenges for healthcare industry in providing appropriate services to customers. The Lean methodology, which is a managerial approach, provides tools necessary to eliminate waste and increase customer satisfaction through increasing quality of the services and decreasing the wait times and costs. The Scope of this paper is to determine and rank the lean criteria for hospitals.
Materials and Methods: 22 base criteria for a lean organization was selected and reconciled to hospitals from literature review. Then they were evaluated by experts in the field using Likert scale, leading to 18 criteria. The correlation of these criteria was found using ISM methodology, followed by ranking of these criteria. Lastly, the criteria were categorized utilizing MICMAC analysis.
Results: utilizing MICMAC analysis, the "defining the flow of processes & continuous improvement", "utilizing visual surveillance to understand the situation & exploit the problems" were identified as the most important variables.
Conclusion: In order to increase quality of services and customer satisfaction and to reduce operating costs, hospitals are advised to utilize lean methodology. In which case the management should pay more attention to the two more important criteria derived by MICMAC analysis, "Defining the processes in order to find problems" and "Continuous improvement and utilizing visual surveillance in order to find problems".
