If someone was looking at starting a collaborative in any field, Healthcare, Manufacturing, could you give them a little of advice on where they might go or how they would start. -jd
Dean Bliss: I wasn’t part of the beginning of the Iowa Healthcare Collaborative, so I can talk about the Lean Consortium a little that we did start several years ago, and one of the things that we got together and kind of had a “what should this be” session where we rounded up a bunch of the people we knew and had a consultant come in and help us conduct a session. So really, it’s kind of a 3P in a way because we were looking at “Well, what should we do and how should we structure it, and what kind of things should we offer?” and all those kind of things and we wanted to do that in advance and not just say “Let’s have a consortium. Let’s all get together and do some stuff.” 
Well, let’s figure out what that stuff is. Let’s figure out what the value is. Let’s figure out what it would mean to be a member, what are the things if I was a member I would expect, what are the things that we can provide that are going to give value to those members? How are we going to deliver it? You know, what are the delivery methods? Is it live? Is it online? Is it podcast? Is it webcast? All those kind of things we wanted to work out in advance before we started taking people’s money essentially because we wanted to make sure that we were going to give something with value.
Again, back to our Lean thinking days; it all starts from value. From there, we said, “All right, should we be a single industry thing? Should we be a multi-industry thing? Is this something that beginners can be part of as well as experienced people can be part of?” We were really kind of setting the framework for what we wanted to be.
Around the country I know, there’re manufacturing-only ones, and there’re multi-industry ones and it really kind of depends on what their area is and what is available in their area. Make sure people don’t have to travel too far to get there, those kinds of things. So all those things were factors as we put the Lean Consortium together, really trying to understand how it’s going to be used, how it’s going to be deployed and what are the things that people are going to get out of it?
Related Podcast and Transcription: A Blissful Conversation
Dean Bliss is a Lean Healthcare Coach for the Iowa Healthcare Collaborative (IHC). He assists Healthcare organizations in learning and applying continuous improvement activities and philosophy.
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