Sigma Six in Healthcare: Healthcare

Healthcare: Six Sigma in Healthcare

In a competitive marketplace, success is dictated by one's ability to ensure that their customers are kept satisfied through zero-defect products and services. Six Sigma is a customer-driven management methodology that helps organizations realize this, and consequently, meet the expectations of their customers by reducing process variation. The program was developed by Motorola Inc., but is widely-associated with General Electric, and most firms have adopted it over the years based on the observed success of the latter. Well, the results have been varied -- for some, positive, and for others, not as expected; but why is this so? Tennant (2001) points out that the effective "application of Six Sigma requires an eclectic source of knowledge and skills, as well as a sound understanding of customer-centered process management" (p. xii). Towards this end, this text seeks to give insight into what Six Sigma really is, how it all began, how it could be implemented by healthcare organizations, and how these organizations stand to benefit from such implementation in the wake of rising healthcare costs, and increasing concern about the deteriorating quality of care.

History of Six Sigma

The Six Sigma framework came into the limelight as a standard of measurement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1777-1855), when Carl Gauss Friedrich introduced the idea of the normal curve. In the 1920s, Walter Shewhart used this framework to develop a standard for measuring product variation, where he demonstrated that a product could only be considered normal if it fell within three sigma from the mean. Well, numerous other standards of measurement, including zero-defect, and Cpk were introduced in the years that followed, but the coinage of the term 'Six Sigma' is attributed to Bill Smith, who, working as an engineer at Motorola Inc. In the 1980s, demonstrated that a product would only fail to impress its end-user if it had defects that needed to be corrected or fixed at some point in the production process (Tennant, 2001). The company was at the time facing serious challenges and had its survival threatened by a high rate of internal failure, and a booming Japanese industry dealing in similar products. The Sigma approach was undertaken to reduce the frequency of defects in the final products by redesigning and improving the process of production. The underlying assumption was that if something was done right the first time, it was unlikely to go wrong for the consumer later on.

Many other companies adopted the program, some, including General Electric and Allied Signal (now Honeywell) in a more enthusiastic fashion that Motorola itself (Tennant, 2001) . The two companies have in fact continued to actively introduce changes geared at increasing performance and quality levels, and eliminating inefficiency and bureaucracy in their business processes. Well, the results have been manifest. In 2000, Sigma began to be recognized as an industry on its own, offering implementation guidelines, as well as consultancy and training services for organizations around the world.