KaiNexus Executive Releases New Book on Leadership and Continuous Improvement

DALLAS - Sept. 2, 2013 - PRLog -- KaiNexus (http://www.kainexus.com), a technology company that “makes improvement happen” for organizations in healthcare and beyond announced today that their chief improvement officer Mark Graban has released a new book, The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen: Leadership for a Continuously Learning and Improving Organization (http://www.hckaizen.com/executive-guide-to-healthcare-kaizen/) that is available now.  KaiNexus is highlighted in sections of the book that discuss the use of web-based systems to help facilitate the Kaizen improvement process.

The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen is designed to be an introduction that focuses on the role of senior leaders in creating an improvement culture. The book is a new edition of the book Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements, which was released in 2012 and recently named a recipient of the prestigious Shingo Professional Publication and Research Award. Healthcare Kaizen will continue to be on the market as a more detailed “how-to guide” for those who are implementing these principles. Read more about how these two books can be used together (http://www.hckaizen.com/how-to-use-the-books-together/).

Graban stated, "It's been very exciting, over the past two years, to see more healthcare organizations embracing and implementing these powerful concepts, especially those that are using KaiNexus software to make their Kaizen process faster and more effective."

Kaizen is a Japanese word that means “change for the better,” popularized by Masaaki Imai in his 1986 book KAIZEN. This book was the original inspiration for the work of KaiNexus CEO and co-founder, Gregory Jacobson, MD, when he led innovative improvement work at Vanderbilt University Medical Center that led to the creation of KaiNexus – the company and its software.

About the book, Dr. Jacobson says, “Healthcare leaders are facing increasingly challenging and uncertain times. Once you understand that every single employee and physician can be a part of the solution, the overall problem of cost and quality becomes manageable and feasible. Kaizen is a big part of the solution, a very big part, and this book gives leaders a great overview of the behaviors that lead to real, sustainable improvement.”

The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen shares some of the management methods and leadership behaviors practiced by leading hospitals, including Franciscan St. Francis Healthcare, where more than 15,000 documented improvements have been made over the last six years, saving more than $5 million, in addition to “soft” improvements in quality, patient safety, patient satisfaction, and staff engagement.  The book covers and provides practical illustrations of the management mindsets and philosophies required to make Kaizen work effectively in a hospital department or as an organization-wide program.

The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen includes a new introduction written by Gary Kaplan, MD, the CEO of Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle. Dr. Kaplan says, “The value of using Kaizen to improve health care systems is indisputable. One of the keys to successful implementation of Kaizen is the serious commitment of leaders – including the CEO, senior executives, physician leaders, and Boards of Directors.”

Published by Productivity Press, The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen is a 200-page paperback that retails for $29.95.  Editorial copies are available upon request or consumer copies may be purchased by visiting Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1466586419/).

For more information about the book, please visit www.hckaizen.com.

About KaiNexus

KaiNexus is an enterprise level web-based SaaS improvement platform designed to implement, manage, and sustain improvement in organizations.  It is scalable and adaptable to any organization, and supports a wide variety of improvement activities including daily staff driven improvement, kaizen events, improvement projects, HRO (high reliability organization) activities, action items and reporting on Joint Commission recommendations, and daily debriefs. KaiNexus “makes improvement happen.”

For more information, visit http://www.KaiNexus.com or find KaiNexus on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Note to Editors

Gregory Jacobson MD, Co-Founder and CEO of KaiNexus, graduated from Washington University in St Louis in 1997 with a BS in Biology.  He attended Baylor College of Medicine from 1997 to 2001.  From 2001 to 2004, he completed a residency in Emergency Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center where he then stayed on as faculty.  Starting in 2004, it was his observation and research of operational inefficiencies and unrealized improvement opportunities that resulted in the creation of a rudimentary software tool at VUMC and, ultimately, the founding of KaiNexus. Jacobson is co-author of “Kaizen: A Method of Process Improvement in the Emergency Department, (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1553-2712.2009.00580.x/abstract)” published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine.

Contact Information:

Gregory Jacobson, MD

Website: www.KaiNexus.com

Email: info@KaiNexus.com

Phone: (469) 454-8055