Identification of the Patient Requirements Using Lean Six Sigma and Data Mining

Lean health care is one of new managing approaches putting the patient at the core of each change. Lean construction is based on visualization for understanding and prioritizing imporvments. By using only visualization techniques, so much important information could be missed. In order to prioritize and select improvements, it’s essential to integrate new analysis tools to achieve a good understanding of what the value is for the patient, analyze their requirements/expectations/needs and prioritize them in light of strong evidences and detailed measures. In that perspective, this paper intends to integrate lean thinking, data mining and six sigma improvement process methods with the goal to develop a lean health care driving methodology. The proposed methodology allows a better understanding of the patient perception of quality based on a Kano questionnaire. Questionnaire results are then analyzed using data mining tools to extract useful information. Finally, six sigma approach is followed to improve the quality of health care services and maximize the patient satisfaction. The main outcome of the study is that the first priority concerns the availability of physicians and health products, followed by the reduction of waiting time and minimization of errors related to prescriptions and diagnostics. The use of the six sigma approach on the medication circuit allows improving those three criteria.