Value Stream Mapping For Healthcare

Although initially used by the manufacturing industry, value stream mapping is now actively sought by healthcare companies. Why? Because mapping your processes and streams clearly indicates areas of process improvement and reduces waste (and who doesn’t love that?)

This is how value stream mapping helps the healthcare industry:

• Saves costs
• Increase production/distribution capacity
• Reduce lead time to customers

Example of Value Stream Mapping in Healthcare:

This map (which was created for a pharmaceutical drug distributor) provides visibility on the supply chain of high-priority drugs and delivery times. Although this map is just 1 small part of a bigger value stream map, the pharmaceutical distributor can easily visualize the best way to ensure timely, accurate deliveries to customers. Also, a more detailed map can shed light on the drug inventory at different locations and associated costs; all to empower you to uncover strategic improvement areas and satisfy your customers with minimal accrued costs.

3 Value Stream Mapping Myths:

1. Mapping value streams is only useful if my healthcare business is on the manufacturing vertical of the supply chain.

Although you can clearly envision how value stream mapping can directly help medical device/equipment manufacturers and pharmacy manufacturers; companies on the distribution, transactional and service side of the supply chain have also benefitted immensely from mapping their value streams.

1. Value stream mapping is just a newer, fancier term for what we’ve been doing for decades.

Not necessarily. Although process optimization has been around for a while, value stream mapping combines various lean process improvement and change management tools to help you gain visibility on every type of value stream and achieve better results against every key metric. That’s why 25% of the Fortune 500 companies use electronic value stream mapping to do what they do better.

3. I need to buy an expensive software to map my company’s value streams.

No, you don’t! You can map your own processes and value streams in-house with your team. Although electronic value streaming software makes this job easier, you can certainly use lean and agile process improvement techniques to do this yourself. That is why we have compiled a cheat sheet to mapping value streams in-house (scroll down to download)!

Cheat sheet on how to map value streams in-house:

Download our comprehensive cheat sheet below to learn how you can map your company’s value streams yourself: