Lean healthcare across cultures: state-of-the-art

Abstract

Lean thinking “translation” from manufacturing to services settings is a topic of growing interest among academics and practitioners. Healthcare organizations have been one of the latest services settings adopting Lean principles, tools and techniques feeding a crescent stream of literature. However, despite of the important contribution of some review articles, the Lean embeddeness in different national Healthcare systems lack cultural appraisal and updating. Through a systematic literature review, this paper presents the state-of-the-art of Lean deployment in Healthcare settings recurring to cultural lenses, classifies the existent literature, enhances cultural (national and organizational) marks and disclosures Lean deployment patterns while answer the question: - Does national cultural resemblance to Japan means a deeper deployment of Lean practices by Healthcare organizations?