The Woodburn Family Medicine clinic for Silverton Health is a case study in LEAN planning and design process. We employed appropriate, targeted LEAN tools to help clinic staff and providers analyze flow problems in their existing clinic, and used this analysis in our work with them to develop a new layout based on optimum practices.

We used simple and effective workshop methods to achieve this, including:

• Using a poster exercise to identify existing problems
• Mapping flow of multiple staff members, patients, information, and materials in the existing clinic
• Mapping the flow of those same people and things during design analysis of proposed layouts
• Building a full-size mock-up of a typical exam room in our office “rapid prototyping workshop”, done in a fast-paced 2-hour meeting

The end result is a clinic that helps staff perform to the best of their abilities to meet the current and future challenges of healthcare delivery.

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