Enhancing Service Quality of a Healthcare Organization through Lean Six Sigma Methods

Abstract — The issue of customer satisfaction has gained increasing attention from executives across the healthcare industry. One of the primary challenges is sustaining customer satisfaction improvement initiatives in the face of competing priorities and diminishing resources. Lean Six-sigma methodology has been implemented in a public healthcare organization to fulfil the organization’s mission of enhancing its customer satisfaction. Thirty key criteria of patient satisfaction have been identified to correlate most highly to a patient’s overall satisfaction with the hospital. This paper demonstrates how significant each of those thirty criteria for the overall satisfaction. The coordination of care has been found to have the most powerful effect in terms of patient satisfaction during a hospital stay. Through the implementation of the procedural steps of Lean Six-sigma methodology, it has been possible to enhance the healthcare service quality of the organization