Success Stories

MEDICAL COLLEGE OF WISCONSIN

I was happy I chose the University of Wisconsin-Madison Executive Education’s Six Sigma program for a number of reasons: the great instructors, the opportunity to share with and learn from my peers, and the convenience of learning, parking, and rooming in the same building. I especially appreciated the excellent adult-learning education with a focus on real-world application of classroom material. The friendly environment made it easier to absorb classroom material: frequent short breaks to recharge my mind, content review sessions to aid in my retention of the material, a low-stress evaluation process, and the delicious, plentiful food helped me enjoy myself throughout. I walked away from the courses with the understanding that workplace problems are largely due to faulty processes and not people. I also learned that you can come up with a great solution to fix a process problem, but if you can’t get user acceptance, the solution will largely go unnoticed. Other ideas that stuck with me were that you have to think outside the box, you must walk through the process to truly identify wastes, and if you minimize handoffs and transitions, you can significantly improve process efficiency. I believe what I learned in the Six Sigma courses will help immensely as our health care facility tackles the challenges of the near future: better utilizing our electronic medical records, increasing transparency and public reporting, doing more with less, and pushing toward the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH).