In this book, Dr. Gabow, former CEO of Denver Health of 20 years, teams up with Philip Goodman, a 34-year veteran of Denver Health who directed the Lean System group, to share their Lean journey. The Lean Prescription: Powerful Medicine for Our Ailing Healthcare System tells the story of how Dr. Gabow led Denver Health to become the first healthcare organization to be awarded the Shingo Bronze Medallion Prize for Operational Excellence. Detailing the foundational Lean principles, the book provides readers with the benefit of the experience of an integrated healthcare system's successful seven-year Lean journey. This book grew out Gabow’s 40 years' experience as a practicing physician, teacher, researcher, and leader of a large, urban public healthcare system. About 10 years into her 20 years as CEO of the healthcare system, she began to look at how one could actually make healthcare work right. After a year of study, she and her team concluded that Lean was exactly what healthcare needed. During the seven-year Lean journey that followed, Denver Health dramatically improved quality of care. Denver Health achieved a reduction of the expected mortality rate to the lowest among the academic health center members of the University Health System Consortium in 2011.The financial results were equally impressive. Denver Health realized almost $200 million of well-documented, hard financial benefit over seven years. This book provides authoritative guidance on how to effectively implement a Lean transformation in a healthcare system that includes hospitals, HMOs, community health centers, call centers, and paramedics. Providing an accessible explanation of the Lean philosophy and tools, the book includes helpful exercises and examples of Lean applications. The book goes beyond the hospital environment to the broader healthcare sector.

Dr. Travis Stork, cohost of The Doctors, cares about the state of your abdomen. Why? Because when he's not on TV, he works in the E.R. at Vanderbilt Medical Center. And his years of training and experience have told him that the one of the very first vital signs to check—one of the most important determining factors in whether a patient will recover from illness and injury, or face a future of disease, pain, and disability—is how much belly fat they're carrying. In fact, visceral fat—the kind that clings to your waistline and infiltrates your internal organs—is not only unsightly, it also sets you up for a host of health woes, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. So fighting belly fat is the same thing as fighting for your life! But now, Dr. Travis, America's top urgent-care doctor, has written the ultimate prescription for curing dangerous belly fat. His revolutionary PICK 3 TO LEAN plan lets you customize your diet and lifestyle to start melting away belly fat, without giving up your favorite foods, without spending hours in the gym, without really sacrificing anything—except belly fat! If you love snacking, if you love desserts, if you love burgers and steaks, if you love big, hearty breakfasts, there's a plan in here for you. With tiny tweaks to the foods you already love and enjoy, you'll begin to see the pounds disappear in just days! Plus, Dr. Travis explains the magic of N.E.A.T.: non-exercise activity thermogenesis, a fancy way of saying "burn more calories without exercising!" You pick the lifestyle you're most comfortable with. You decide which foods you want to eat. You choose what fun activities you want to enjoy. With The Lean Belly Prescription, you will have a plan custom-designed by you—with the help of Dr. Travis—that's scientifically proven to strip away up to 15 pounds in just 4 weeks. With The Lean Belly Prescription, you'll find yourself eating more the foods you love, spending more time doing the things you love, and having more fun with the people you love. Dr. Travis will teach you how to do that because The Lean Belly Prescription is a whole-life plan, taking in variables other diets don't consider, and offering weight-loss opportunities you didn't know you had. The result: a prescription plan you'll love, and stay on for the rest of your life because of how it makes you feel.

Intelligence is wasted on problems that themselves have been caused by an excess of intelligence. Lean Brain Management strives toward uncompromising Lean Brain Quality. Lean Brain stands for consistent economization of intelligence in all realms of life: Intelligent systems will only be operated by unskilled workers. Education, universities, and schools would become obsolete. A week of training would be enough for virtually any job. ("You are now the physician for the measles in the State of Ohio. In response to phone calls, send this prescription.") Lean Brain is not aimed at dumbing down! Lean Brain can survive on just a very small amount of central intelligence. Potential savings amount to trillions! This is demonstrated using Germany as an example. With this book, Dueck presents a radical suggestion for world improvement. The desire to laugh infinitely about it will eventually segue into a collective rude awakening. The book contains concrete advice for managers to economize on intelligence, and is thus—in keeping with the theme—written in an easy-to-read fashion. It contains no self-doubt whatsoever. Awarded the Business Book Prize from Financial Times Deutschland and getAbstract AG

Ratchet fans get ready to find out what happens to the Doc when he and his friend Calvin are pulled into the crazy world of ass injections and Dirty Sprite. Will the pair be able to handle all the drama that goes along with living life in the fast lane? Join them in this comical tale of fat cakes and lean shakes.Attention: Although this book is part of the My Ratchet Secret Series it is also a stand alone title that can be read alone. For the Ratchet fans this book takes place after part 3 of My Ratchet Secret and before book 4

This hard-hitting expose does for prescription drugs what "Silent Spring" did for pesticides, revealing the hidden dangers of the most commonly prescribed medications--and what the consumer can do to minimize the risks of serious side effects.

How to fix the Modern American Diet and reclaim our minds and waistlines “An insightful, eye opening adventure into diet and nutrition. Concise and witty, this book kept me engaged from cover to cover. A must-have for anyone serious about getting happy and healthy naturally.”—Andrew Morton, MD, Board-certified Family Physician; Former Medical Corps, US Navy and Army Infantry Medic, Desert Storm For the first time in history, too much food is making us sick. The Modern American Diet (MAD) is expanding our waistlines while starving and shrinking our brains. Rates of obesity and depression have recently doubled, and though these epidemics are closely linked, few experts are connecting the dots for the average American. Using data from the rapidly changing fields of neuroscience and nutrition, The Happiness Diet shows that over the past several generations, small, seemingly insignificant changes to our diet have stripped it of nutrients—like magnesium, vitamin B12, iron, and vitamin D, as well as some very special fats—that are essential for happy, well-balanced brains. These shifts also explain the overabundance of mood-destroying foods in the average American’s diet and why they predispose most of us to excessive weight gain. After a clear explanation of how we’ve all been led so far astray, The Happiness Diet empowers the reader to steer clear of this MAD way of life with simple, straightforward solutions, including: • A list of foods to swear off • Shopping tips and kitchen organization tricks • A compact healthy cookbook full of brain-building recipes • Practical advice, meal plans, and more! Graham and Ramsey guide you through these steps and then remake your diet by doubling down on feel-good foods—even the all-American burger. Praise for The Happiness Diet “Finally, a rock-solid, reliable, informative, and entertaining book on how to eat your way to health and happiness. Run—don’t walk—to read and adopt The Happiness Diet. This is the only diet book I’ve encountered that I can actually recommend to patients without reservation.”—Bonnie Maslin, PhD, Psychologist and author of Picking Your Battles “A lively, thorough, and iron-clad case for real food. You will never eat an egg-white omelet or soy protein shake again.”—Nina Planck, author of Real Food and Real Food for Mother and Baby “The book includes food lists, shopping tips, brain-building recipes, smart slimming strategies, and other useful tools to lose weight and keep the blues at bay.”—AM New York

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit Adapting agile practices to your development organization Uncovering and eradicating waste throughout the software development lifecycle Practical techniques for every development manager, project manager, and technical leader Lean software development: applying agile principles to your organization In Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck identify seven fundamental "lean" principles, adapt them for the world of software development, and show how they can serve as the foundation for agile development approaches that work. Along the way, they introduce 22 "thinking tools" that can help you customize the right agile practices for any environment. Better, cheaper, faster software development. You can have all three–if you adopt the same lean principles that have already revolutionized manufacturing, logistics and product development. Iterating towards excellence: software development as an exercise in discovery Managing uncertainty: "decide as late as possible" by building change into the system. Compressing the value stream: rapid development, feedback, and improvement Empowering teams and individuals without compromising coordination Software with integrity: promoting coherence, usability, fitness, maintainability, and adaptability How to "see the whole"–even when your developers are scattered across multiple locations and contractors Simply put, Lean Software Development helps you refocus development on value, flow, and people–so you can achieve breakthrough quality, savings, speed, and business alignment.

Lean Thinking was launched in the fall of 1996, just in time for the recession of 1997. It told the story of how American, European, and Japanese firms applied a simple set of principles called 'lean thinking' to survive the recession of 1991 and grow steadily in sales and profits through 1996. Even though the recession of 1997 never happened, companies were starving for information on how to make themselves leaner and more efficient. Now we are dealing with the recession of 2001 and the financial meltdown of 2002. So what happened to the exemplar firms profiled in Lean Thinking? In the new fully revised edition of this bestselling book those pioneering lean thinkers are brought up to date. Authors James Womack and Daniel Jones offer new guidelines for lean thinking firms and bring their groundbreaking practices to a brand new generation of companies that are looking to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Organizations around the world are using Lean to redesign care and improve processes in a way that achieves and sustains meaningful results for patients, staff, physicians, and health systems. Lean Hospitals, Third Edition explains how to use the Lean methodology and mindsets to improve safety, quality, access, and morale while reducing costs, increasing capacity, and strengthening the long-term bottom line. This updated edition of a Shingo Research Award recipient begins with an overview of Lean methods. It explains how Lean practices can help reduce various frustrations for caregivers, prevent delays and harm for patients, and improve the long-term health of your organization. The second edition of this book presented new material on identifying waste, A3 problem solving, engaging employees in continuous improvement, and strategy deployment. This third edition adds new sections on structured Lean problem solving methods (including Toyota Kata), Lean Design, and other topics. Additional examples, case studies, and explanations are also included throughout the book. Mark Graban is also the co-author, with Joe Swartz, of the book Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Frontline Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements, which is also a Shingo Research Award recipient. Mark and Joe also wrote The Executive’s Guide to Healthcare Kaizen.

It has been almost 20 years since the Institute of Medicine released the seminal report titled, Crossing the Quality Chasm. In it, the IoM identified six domains of care quality (safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and patient-centric) and noted a huge gap between the current state and the desired state. Although this report received a great deal of attention, sadly there has been little progress in these areas. In the U.S., healthcare still has huge disparities, is inefficient, and is fragmented with delays in care that are often unsafe. Most U.S. citizens are expected to suffer from a diagnostic error sometime during their lifetime, not receive a large fraction of recommended care, and pay for one of the most expensive systems in the world. Much has been written about quality improvement over the years but many prominent quality and safety experts. Yet progress has been slow. Some have called on the healthcare professions to look outside of healthcare to other industries using examples in nuclear power and airlines for safety, the hotel and entertainment industry for a ‘customer’ focus, and the automotive industry, particularly Toyota for efficiency (Lean). This book by Dr. Oppenheim on lean healthcare systems engineering (LHSE) is a fresh approach that brings forth concepts that systems engineers have used in huge national defense projects. What’s unique in this book is that these powerful system engineering tools are modified to be able to address smaller sized healthcare problems that still involve similar problems in fragmentation and poor communication and coordination. This book is an invaluable reference for a new powerful process named Lean Healthcare Systems Engineering (LHSE) for managing workflow and care improvement projects in all clinical environments. The book applies to ambulatory clinics and hospitals of all types including operating rooms, emergency departments, and ancillary departments, clinical and imaging laboratories, pharmacies, and population health. The book presents a generic rigorous but not mathematical step-by-step process of integrated healthcare, systems engineering and Lean. The book also contains the first major product created with the LHSE process, namely tabularized summaries of representative projects in healthcare delivery applications, called Lean Enablers for Healthcare Projects. Each full-page enabler table lists the challenges and wastes, powerful improvement goals, risks, and expected benefits, and some useful descriptions of the healthcare system of interest. The book provides user-friendly solutions to major problems in healthcare delivery operations in all clinical environments, addressing fragmentation, wastes, wrong incentives, ad-hoc and stove-piped management, lack of optimized processes, hierarchy gradient, lack of systems thinking, “blaming and shaming culture”, burnout of providers and many others.