Doug Sears, director of performance improvement and knowledge transfer, Bon Secours Health System, Marriottsville, MD
Doug Sears is a senior member of ASQ and is a certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt through the Juran Institute. Additionally, he is certified in lean through the University of Michigan School of Engineering and is an advanced statistical application expert with the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers.
Sears is a 14-year senior alumni examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and a senior examiner for the Maryland Performance Excellence Award. He is also a judge for the Virginia Senate Productivity award and the U. S. Army Communities of Excellence Award. Sears is a member of the adjunct faculty of the E. Claiborne Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond, VA. There, he teaches strategic process improvement in the MBA program using the Baldrige model and lean Six Sigma as the framework for the course.
Since 1991 Sears has worked for Bon Secours Health System (BSHSI). He is a director of performance improvement and knowledge transfer and is responsible for developing, implementing and leading processes to enhance performance excellence throughout the organization. Sears leads a comprehensive lean Six Sigma performance improvement program throughout Bon Secours. He teaches all lean Six Sigma courses and has certified and mentored 62 Black Belts and more than 600 Green Belts within Bon Secours.
He has been instrumental in integrating and institutionalizing the lean Six Sigma philosophy and concepts into key business processes and organizational culture. He has facilitated more than 300 diverse and successful performance improvement projects and conducted more than 250 lean Six Sigma and performance improvement education sessions for more than 5,000 BSHSI leaders and employees. These efforts have had a multi-million dollar impact on BSHSI.
Sears also leads BSHSI’s knowledge transfer initiative, which includes integrating people, processes and technology to rapidly replicate proven practices across the organization. This initiative is a key aspect of enhancing performance excellence which achieved a more than $77 million impact on productivity, supply chain, length of stay reduction and revenue enhancement in 2007. Sears is also leading a redesign of the system’s emergency care service line, including 17 emergency departments, to improve patient throughput and satisfaction, safety, quality and volume.
In this Six Sigma Forum Magazine article, “Healthcare Rx—Six Sigma or ‘Whack a Mole’?” Sears wrote, he says the following about using Six Sigma for healthcare:
Whenever I go to a carnival one of my favorite games is Whack a Mole. The wicked mole pops up and you whack him into submission—then he pops up somewhere else and you whack him again. It sure feels great when you hit him but he keeps coming back again and again. I guess one reason it’s so much fun is the analogy with improving health care: we see the problem, take immediate action, get some results, have a little fun and excitement, get rid of a little frustration, and the problem disappears—only to resurface at the next silo. While whack a mole may be faster in the short run, the key to ongoing success in any organization is cost-effective sustainable improvement. Enter Six Sigma—simply making better decisions by understanding:
The Voice of the Customer: A validated and up-to-date knowledge of your customer’s needs and expectations, how you are meeting these, and how you stack up with your competition and best-in-class performers. The customer always defines quality—without hearing his voice we are whacking with our eyes and ears closed.
The Voice of the Business: Using models such as the Baldrige Criteria and the balanced scorecard to integrate and strategically align our actions. Deploying and integrating these models to key processes provides learning and focus. Six Sigma is extremely powerful in addressing cross-functional processes and tackling the silo mentality we have so effectively built in healthcare.
Management by Fact: If you are making decisions without proper data analysis what are you making them with? Six Sigma elicits leverage—focusing on the vital few for maximum strategic impact. Six Sigma is proactive—building and applying customer-focused predictive process models—as opposed to reactive mole-whacking. Proper analytical and evidenced based approaches give us the courage to challenge many long held assumptions and move from a subjective to an exploratory, objective and action-oriented paradigm.
Our People: One of the most exciting and intriguing aspects of Six Sigma is employee engagement. Six Sigma is a democratic process with a simple premise—the person doing the work knows more about it that anyone else. This Tight-Loose-Tight model empowers employees with the freedom to do their job within a clearly defined and aligned organizational framework.
For those pundits that declare Six Sigma irrelevant, I submit that the aforementioned factors are essential in health care. In fact, the more complicated the system (per our recently departed Peter Drucker healthcare is the most complex) the more difficult it is to make good decisions. Remember Steven Covey: “If you always do what you always did you will always get what you always got”. No science projects or analysis paralysis, not even Green Belts or Black Belts—Six Sigma is simply a different way of thinking. So, the next time you get ready to ‘Whack a Mole’ go to a carnival—or better yet—take a deep breath and think about improving your odds of getting rid of him once and for all.
