Transforming to a Quality Culture

We describe the cultural transformation of the surgical pathology laboratory at Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, MI, to one that has adopted an expectation for empowered workers to see their daily work in the context of continually learning and making effective process improvements that are designed and tested by the scientific method. This transformation has been achieved by creating an organizational and educational framework for implementing guiding principles originally systematized as the basis of lean manufacturing by our founder, Henry Ford, at the turn of the century, and incorporating the innovations of the Toyota Production System. We present novel data collection techniques to establish baseline states by which to gauge the success of changes and lessons from rapid process improvement studies. Herein, we share our experiences, lessons learned, and successes to date in the pathology-based Henry Ford Production System. We do not make changes for the sake of making them, but we never fail to make a change once it is demonstrated that the new way is better than the old way. We hold it our duty to permit nothing to stand in the way of progress. —Henry Ford 1