ABSTRACT
Lean Healthcare Systems Engineering (LHSE) projects have four distinct phases: background, analysis of current state, design of future state, and implementation. This chapter discusses these four phases. The main objective of the project phase called Analysis of Current State (AoCS) is to acquire perfect understanding of the present state and gather evidence with data. The first step in the AoCS is to select the “System of Interest (SoI),” project scope, and system elements including both human stakeholders and non-human nodes, for example, the Electronic Health Record. Fragmentation is recognized as one of the biggest evils of healthcare in all healthcare systems. LHSE manages fragmentation by identifying and fixing all imperfect interfaces between the relevant fragmented elements within the SoI and those with externalities. Most of architecting charts are useful in the next phase of the LHSE project, Design of Future State. The Problem Statement should be the last element of the AoCS.
