ABSTRACT
A misconception about lean thinking that may have slowed its acceptance in healthcare is the belief that lean’s focus on effciency, flow, and standardization is so mechanistic that it ignores the customer and the human elements of care. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lean is a production method that considers as wasteful the expenditure of resources for anything other than the purpose of creating value for the end customer. Indeed, lean practitioners often define the word value as something for which a customer would be willing to pay.
