The practicality of error reduction in an outpatient pharmacy setting: Using Lean Six Sigma to enhance patient safety.

摘要

The purpose of this project was to determine if Lean and Six Sigma techniques can be combined to help reduce medication errors in healthcare. Specifically, the focus of this project was to evaluate medication errors from an outpatient /retail pharmacy. Medication errors were evaluated at one of seven outpatient retail pharmacies in a large health system to show that 14% of the medications had an error.;Using the DMAIC methodology combined with Lean, the project team was able to implement process changes to decrease medication errors associated with data entry by more than 50% over the course of five months. Combining both Lean and Six Sigma methodologies can significantly impact organizations to have more efficient processes and continuous quality improvement (George, 2002). By making processes more efficient, the overall lead time will also be improved, positively impacting customer satisfaction.