Summary
Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics used Toyota Production System principles to streamline the process by which patients are transferred to outpatient clinics. Key improvements included obtaining advanced insurance authorization, enhancing patient involvement, standardizing and simplifying referral request and appointment scheduling processes, and using automated systems to track referrals and scheduling and to measure performance, thus enabling the rapid identification of sources of error and delay. The program significantly reduced scheduling time, time to the patient’s first appointment, and communication errors, leading to a near doubling in the number of patient transfers completed each month.