IOM and the Six Aims for Improvement - Aim #5 Efficient

Care should be EFFICIENT: avoiding waste, including waste of equipment, supplies, ideas and energy.

Labor Intensive: Most healthcare provider organizations are "labor-intensive" and "capital-intensive". Yet, unlike most capital intensive industries, healthcare does not receive the trade-off between capital and labor common in manufacturing (e.g. higher investments in capital result in reductions in labor costs). So, it is typical to find health care provider organizations where labor accounts for 60 to 70% of the total cost of doing business.

Time intensive service: From the patient (customer's) experience, health care services are time intensive. Requiring scheduled time away from work, waits and delays to experience the service, and in many cases, a period of recuperation where the rest of life slows down for the patient and the patient's care givers. Said differently, the experience of health care services is time intensive for the customer.

Focusing improvement efforts on process time should simultaneously improve both the labor cost of providing the service (from the provider view) and the time cost of experiencing the service (from the customer view). Focus the first improvement efforts on the cycle time to provide services to maximize value added contact time with the patient and minimize non-value added time wasters and synchronize services for rapid throughput from the point of request to resolution of the service event to minimize the total contact time of the patient in the system of care.