Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Photo Diary of Patient Central Innovation site 3P design process

We have completed 5 days of a LEAN 3P (Product, Preparation, Process)  to plan and design our new Primary Health Care innovation site.  

There were about 60 participants with some coming and going, but mostly 30 - 40 participants present at any given time.  Participants came from all perspectives of Health Care: 

Some of the participants 
  • Community members / Patients / Clients (The most important ones)
  • Health Care Providers : Physicians, Nurse Practitioner, Pharmacy, Dietician, Diabetes Ed, Exercise therapist, Registered Nursing, Optometrist, Mental health, Podiatry
  • Health Care support and admin staff
  • Patient Safety and Improvement folks
  • Also representation from:
    • Health Quality Council
    • Ministry
    • Architect firm - Aodbt
    Dallas is our architect from Aodbt in Saskatoon
    • First Nations
    • Sunrise Health Region senior management
    • Public Health






Mike Weishaar (Main Facilitator) from JBA
 All of this was facilitated by LEAN consultants from John Black and associates (JBA).

Steve Manthey (Architect background) from JBA





There was a lot of work that came before the 5 day 3P process:  

  • Introduction to LEAN philosophy and terminology
  • Crafting our innovation site Mission, Vision and Principles
  • Identifying our "service lines" 
    • Primary Care
    • Urgent Care
    • Chronic Disease Care(Prevention and management)

Vision, Mission and Service lines on the wall

  • Identifying what data we need to collect for each service line
    • Hours of operation
    • Conditions and symptoms patients present with 80% of the time
    • Numbers of providers
    • Time spent with provider
    • Time spent in different places / procedures / processes etc
    • Time spent waiting  
  • 3 Weeks of data collection: (Yes - for those last few measures we had patients and others with stopwatches timing every step of the way)
Then the 3P started on Monday 16 July 2012:

Day 1 of 3P:
  •  Review of LEAN philosophy for benefit of new participants not present previously
  • Overview of project scope

  • Freeing the mind game (out of the box ideas)


  • Signing a "contract" on being respectful to other's ideas and to feel comfortable coming up with creative ideas even if they sound crazy.


  • Creating fishbone diagrams for the 3 service lines
    • Every step involved in different processes
    • Identify for every process the 4 M's:
      • Method
      • Manpower
      • Machine
      • Materials

Fishbone diagram for 1 of the servicer lines
Day 2 of 3P:


  • Report out on the fishbone diagrams:


Lindsay explaining the urgent care fishbone diagram
Dr Johan (Vorster) reviewing primary care fishbone diagram















  • Reviewing the data that was collected over the 3 weeks prior to 3P:
Some of the data that was collected displayed on the wall
Some data was collected by the health region for planning the new hospital.
We picked the relevant data to our project



Brenda reviewing some of the data

  • Creating Prado graphs (Graphs containing data of what happens 80% of the time):
Mary and Terilynn creating a Prado graph

  • Creating routings (line with different steps in a process) for the top 80% of presentations
  • Grouping similar routings together and recognizing 3 "cells" with similar steps


  • Reviewing the "Must Have" Components and "Nice to Have" Components for our site
  • Report out at the end of the day 

Dr Phillip (Fourie) summarizes for the report out at the end of Day 2

Day 3 of 3P:


  • We started the day with "blue sky" designs (no restrictions, no walls) - we only had to think about flow in the 3 cells.  Everybody had to individually come up with 3 designs.
Wilmer telling us all about his 3 designs
  • We had a report out and everybody got a chance - about 30 people and each talking 1-2 minutes about their design concepts.
  • Then the architect gave us the confines of the floor plan and we had to design within those confines.  All 3 tables with the service lines had to come up with 4 designs with 2 people per plan.

Dr Johan (Roodt) busy designing

  • Once each table had their 4 designs, then the table had to vote with "dot voting" after each plan was explained to the others 3.  
Dr Johan (Roodt) showing the highlights of his table's winning plan to one of the other tables


  • The plans that were not chosen were put up on the wall.
Some of the designs that were not chosen

  • We were then left to start building 3D models of the winning design at each table.  So we ended  up with three 3D models at the end of the day.
  • The day ended with a report out to senior management.



Dr Phillip (Fourie) showing his design to senior management (Sherrell and Lorilei)




Day 4 of 3P:

  • We continued on building on our 3D models
  • On day 4 we gave the facilitators some extra stress.  We had left some space for future development that could potentially be used by other interested physicians.  We decided to add a fourth table with 1 member from each table that would catch up and design space for the other physicians. 


Adding rooms to the plan

The plans came alive when the 3D designs started to take shape.

  • We had to add in some different coloured string lines which demonstrated flow of patients, providers, machines and utilities.

Patient and provider flow demonstrated with different coloured string

  • We then had 4 3D designs and with dot voting we chose 1 winner.   
The vote was close between first and second place - this was the second place design



The winning design


The provider conference or "offstage" area in the winning design


  • The facilitators then split us into 2 groups and 1 group made a larger 3D model of the winning design and the other group started building life size rooms of some of the more frequently used rooms - like the exam rooms.

Putting together a room

An exam room to test flow and positioning of furniture.

Day 5 of 3P: (Final day)


  • We were ahead of schedule on the morning of day 5
  • We had a lot of fun.  I wrote a play with 5 common scenarios to demonstrate team based care delivery.  Every single participant in the 3P had a role to play and the cool thing was that the real patients played the patients and the real providers played the providers.  (the others were either patients or family members or helped with data collection on the times it took for patients to move through the system.
  • At 3pm we had a report out which was in the form of a play.  It was a huge success, but that is a story for another day .....






1 comment:

  1. Wow! Congratulations Phillip and team!! What a huge amount of progress in a very short time ....I suppose it may not feel short to some of you :)

    It’s so exciting to see all the important threads of primary care being woven together in such a coherent, thoughtful way. Intentional design, building on the great work that's gone before -- both within your region, and with the chronic disease management collaboratives -- and involving all your key partners (especially patients and the community!), is jump starting truly patient centred care that will not only meet the needs of your patient population, but help inform PHC transformation across SK.

    Jenn and the rest of the HQC team are extremely excited to work alongside your team and to have the opportunity to offer whatever help we can as you continue your design and improvement journey!

    -Rosemary Gray
    Program Director, HQC

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