This book is part of a series of titles that are a spin-off of the Shingo Prize-winning book Leveraging Lean in Healthcare: Transforming Your Enterprise into a High Quality Patient Care Delivery System. Each book in the series focuses on a specific aspect of healthcare that has demonstrated significant process and quality improvements after a Lean implementation. Lean principles can help medical laboratories drive up efficiencies and quality without increasing costs or compromising quality. Leveraging Lean in Medical Laboratories: Creating a Cost Effective, Standardized, High Quality, Patient-Focused Operation provides a functional understanding of Lean laboratory processes and quality improvement techniques. This book is an ideal guide for healthcare executives, leaders, process improvement team members, and inquisitive frontline workers who want to implement and leverage Lean in medical laboratories. Supplying detailed descriptions of Lean tools and methodologies, it identifies powerful Lean solutions specific to the needs of the medical laboratory. The first section provides an overview of Lean concepts, tools, methodologies, and applications. The second section focuses on the application of Lean in the laboratory environment. Presenting numerous examples, stories, case studies, and lessons learned, it examines the normal operation of each area in the lab environment and highlights the areas where typical problems occur. Next, it walks readers through various Lean initiatives and demonstrates how Lean tools and concepts have been used to achieve lasting improvements to processes and quality of care. It also supplies actionable blueprints that readers can duplicate or modify for use in their own institutions. Illustrating leadership's role in achieving departmental goals, this book will provide you with a well-rounded understanding of how Lean can be applied to achieve significant improvements throughout the entire continuum of care.