Implementing Six Sigma in the Netherlands

Health care today is facing serious problems: costs are exploding and quality of care doesn't meet the patient's needs. Optimizing efficiency appears to be an imperative for any hospital. Quality of care however has to be improved as well. Health care process improvement can produce a decrease in costs and an increase in quality and thus produces the efficiency improvement that is required. Six Sigma is a process-focused strategy and methodology for business improvement developed in industry that in recent years has been implemented in a number of hospitals. The results are very convincing. Six Sigma has demonstrated that substantial savings can be achieved while quality can be improved. Therefore in our opinion Six Sigma is an excellent solution to deal with present-day health care problems.