Week 3 of 17
FEBRUARY 3 TO 9
Fiction. No real student, family or grade appears.
Should an emergency room be designed for average speed or for the sickest patient? Optimizing throughput means the median person waits less and the rare complicated one waits much longer.
Everyone affected by the ER, not just patients. Nurses, triage, registration, cleaning staff, families in the waiting room, the ambulance crew who cannot leave until they hand off.
TEAMMATE
Nobody thought about the ambulance crew. They cannot leave until they hand off.
Mapping the actual path a patient takes, step by step, with the waits marked. The waits are where the design problem lives.
We wrote and signed an actual team contract: who does what, how we decide when we disagree, and what happens if somebody does not deliver.
A brief naming one specific inefficiency with evidence from our flow map. Not the ER is slow. This step, this wait, this many minutes.