Lean Management Applied To The Service Sector – In The Medical Practice Use Case

This article deals with the transfer of the lean management concept to the service sector, specifically to the healthcare sector and medical practices. In the ageing societies of industrialised countries, the resulting increase in demand for care and the simultaneous cost pressure in the healthcare sector, it is important to develop concepts that could contribute to more efficient care in the healthcare sector. Lean management itself has been extensively researched and is already being practised successfully in many areas. The idea was therefore to be able to apply this concept in the healthcare sector in order to tackle the challenges there. The purpose of this work was to find out whether there are already considerations and concrete concepts in the area of lean management for the healthcare sector and whether and how these can be implemented.

To reach this, a systematic literature review was carried out to obtain an overview of the current state of research. In addition to existing concepts such as the lean hospital, starting points and implementation options for partial aspects of lean management in medical practices were analysed and presented. The results show that although concepts such as the lean hospital exist, there are many more approaches from lean management and the transfer of these to medical practices has not yet been extensively discussed. Considerations and possibilities for this were also presented in this work.