About

Population health lean

Abstract

For transforming organizations and communities, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Population Health Division has embraced population health lean---a transdisciplinary management system for learning, adaptation, innovation, and continuous improvement based on the Toyota Production System (lean), collective impact and other methods. Our training focus is on lean thinking. Our core values include humility, respect for people, teamwork, embracing challenges, genchi genbutsu (“go and see” to empathize and understand), and kaizen (continuous improvement).

Introduction

Humans have three core cognitive-behavioral processes: deciding, acting, and learning. Adaptation comes from adjusting our decisions and actions based on what we learn. Improvements are adaptations that make things better. These processes---mediated by emotions---are fundamental to all human activities, and form the basis for innovation and continuous improvement.
To become a learning organization, we must ensure:

• decision quality (decisions, supported by data science),
• strategic execution (actions: project/portfolio management), 
• performance improvement (learning, improved results), and 
• positive and safe environments (emotions, see “NewSmart”)

Population health is “a systems framework for studying and improving the health of populations through collective action and learning” [1]. Lean practice is “systematically developing people to solve problems and consuming the fewest possible resources while continuously improving processes to provide value to com- munity members and prosperity to society” [2]. Population health lean (PHL) is a transdisciplinary management system for continuous learning, adaptation, innovation, and improvement based on lean thinking and practice, the PHL leadership philosophy, and complementary frameworks (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1: Population health lean transdisciplinary management system for learning, innovation, and improvement

Lean leadership philosophy

Figure 2: Population Health Lean Leadership Philosophy

Key summary document, Population Health Lean: An Overview, available from <http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/825430qn>.