Six Sigma Approach



Six Sigma Approach

Introduction

Medication administration and laboratory processing/results reporting are examples of complex systems in healthcare that are known to be error prone. At Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, errors with IV medication drips and laboratory processing and results reporting were well documented (Logothetis 2000). The purpose of this paper is to describe our initial experience utilizing the Six Sigma methodology to reduce medication and laboratory errors and improve patient safety in a tertiary care hospital affiliated with an academic medical center. The specific long-term project goal is to determine whether this error reduction methodology can be successfully applied in healthcare to improve patient safety (Hoerl 2011).

Error and systems

Errors in healthcare result in part from poorly designed complex systems. Six Sigma is an error reduction methodology that has been successfully applied in industry, most notably at General Electric and Motorola. It represents both a management discipline and a standardized approach to problem solving and process optimization. When used as a metric, Six Sigma technically means having no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities in any process, product or service (Gygi 2005). Six Sigma is so named because its powerful tools provide a proven methodology of reducing error rates to the amount that would fall under a bell curve six standard deviations (or sigmas) from the mean. The goal is to redesign a given process to Six Sigma specifications to insure that the process is 99.99975% error free. The likelihood of an error occurring in a process with Six Sigma would be 3.4 per million opportunities (Ferraco & Spaeth 2012).

This measure is thought to be overly ambitious for the personnel intensive process in healthcare but eminently adaptable with somewhat less optimistic objectives. Six Sigma uses basic tools to reduce error through quantitative methods of benchmarking, design of experiments ...