LPA Hosts Healthcare Workshop with University Health
LPA’s healthcare team recently hosted a Lean Design Thinking workshop at its San Antonio studio for systemwide outpatient leaders from University Health (UH), the San Antonion-based public health system. The event, facilitated by LPA Principal, Director of Healthcare Muhsin Lihony and University Health Senior Vice President of Ambulatory Services Katherine Reyes, centered around using Lean Design Thinking principles to further improve the patient, customer and team member experience.
University Health, a major healthcare provider with two teaching hospitals and a network of outpatient centers, is rapidly expanding its hospital and ambulatory operations in Bexar County. Reyes has been spearheading efforts to adopt Lean processes & methodologies — a systematic, customer-centered management approach — to eliminate waste, improve efficiency and increase value for patients and caregivers.
"Lean helps us define problems before jumping into solutions," said Reyes during the summit." Lean forces us to slow down and ask, ‘How do we know what is really the problem?’ You have to ask why, why, why, why, and why."
Lihony emphasized the importance of Lean Design Thinking in achieving better outcomes in complex healthcare environments by engaging the operations and strategy stakeholders and decision makers from inception through completion of each project. His presentation highlighted Lean's ability to improve processes and planning to significantly reduce costs and timelines, including a recent project that cut significant time off its development schedule by "eliminating unnecessary steps."
The workshop offered participants interactive learning opportunities, including a deep dive into the use of A3s, a Lean tool for defining and solving specific problems. UH leadership shared their own A3s, focused on improving operations, ranging from reducing patient no-shows to better managing chemotherapy infusion times, improving wheelchair maintenance and maximizing patient throughput.
Several key Lean Design Thinking concepts emerged from the presentations and discussions:
- Pull planning: Starting from the end goal and working backward to compress project schedules.
- Cheap time vs. expensive time: Emphasizing early-stage planning when changes are less costly and reactive corrections can be minimized.
- Integrated teams: Using Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), where stakeholders share risk and rewards, fostering collaboration and reducing waste from start to finish.
- Quality assurance vs. quality control: Prioritizing preventative measures early in the process to avoid costly errors later.
- Building Information Modeling: Designers “build” the facility in 3D virtual space well before construction to identify problems “while time is cheap.”
Lihony presented LPA’s under-construction Hoag Hospital Irvine Expansion as a case study, illustrating how Lean Design Thinking helped designers completely rethink the patient experience. "Design should never tell you what the process should be,” Lihony said. “It should always be the opposite. The patient’s needs dictate the right operations, which then inform design.”
KANO Model
Reyes presented the KANO model, a Lean product development framework developed by professor Noriaki Kano in the 1980s, for understanding the needs of customers and maximizing satisfaction. She shared how University Health is using the framework to develop operational best practices and forge a care model of the future. After a discussion of key KANO concepts like “dissatisfiers” and “delighters”, participants broke into small groups and sketched out new concepts for improving the patient experience in their own departments.
The event concluded with a Plus/Delta exercise in which the group developed a list of follow-up steps to build on the momentum of the workshop. Several attendees stressed the value of training executive leadership in Lean Design Thinking, reinforcing that the concepts apply not only to design & construction but to broader healthcare strategies and operations. “Everything here applies to what we do and how we help our patients and caregivers,” summarized one participant.
Plus/Delta exercise
This summit underscored how Lean Design Thinking can drive meaningful transformations in any industry, including healthcare, by aligning strategy, operations and design with the needs of customers.
"Lean Design Thinking isn't just about efficiency – it's about creating lasting value by aligning processes with the real needs of patients and staff," said Lihony. "When delighting the customer becomes our focus, efficiency comes naturally.”
LPA Principal, Director of Healthcare Muhsin Lihony and University Health Senior Vice President of Ambulatory Services Katherine Reyes
