Lean Readiness Index for Malaysian Hospitals: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory study on the development of a lean readiness index for Malaysian hospitals. A questionnaire survey was obtained from 118 public hospitals, a lean readiness model is developed using structural equation modeling (SEM), and the relevant constructs are identified using confirmatory factor analysis. The Lean Readiness Index (LRI) is formulated and a LRI’s ruler is proposed to meet the objective of the study. The finding to emerge from this study is that only 10.1% of Malaysian public hospitals have ‘good’ readiness status. The study also revealed the overall LRI’s value is 0.617 and, the majority of the hospitals were categorized as having ‘fair’ and ‘weak’ readiness status. The result indicated that training had the strongest association towards lean readiness while communication is the least. This study revealed the readiness level for lean implementation in Malaysian public hospitals and proposed the required foundation that needs to be enhanced before implementing lean.