Continuous Improvement and Lean

The Center for Health Care Quality (CHCQ), in alignment with The California Department of Public Health (CDPH), is focusing on being agile, adaptive, and responsive to the public health challenges facing California and our diverse communities. We are committed to Continuous Improvement and Lean methodologies by promoting a culture of trust, respect, innovation, and learning within our Center so we can provide the best services to California residents and our stakeholders.

For a public organization Lean is defined as: Systematically developing people to solve problems and consuming the fewest possible resources while continuously improving processes to provide value to community members and prosperity to society. 

Improvements can be incremental or breakthrough. A beneficial aspect of Lean is that we also save costs which contributes to our responsibility to be good financial stewards of public funds.  

CHCQ Continuous Improvement Initiatives

The Center has been implementing performance improvement projects for over six years in conjunction with both internal and external assessments, and recommendations from expert consultants. The services provided by CHCQ on behalf of CDPH are regulated by local, state, and federal agencies. In many cases, polices are in place to ensure quality measures, licensing, response, and corrective actions within facilities are fulfilled in the appropriate timelines. Each initiative contributes technology or process advancements designed to eliminate waste in processes, procedures, and the cost of doing business.

The following are examples of improvement projects and initiatives within CHCQ: