Management Control Systems for Lean Management in Medical Services: A case study at Lund and Kameda

The financial position of the medical insurance system of Japanese government has been worsened recently, and thus the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has prompted the medical reforms to reconstruct the financial balance of the medical insurance system. As one of these efforts, a fixed payment system for medical services based on “DPC” (Diagnosis Procedure Combination) was introduced to a number of hospitals in Japan. This cost crisis in health care is also evident in Sweden. Thus it followed that both Japanese and Swedish hospitals are required to provide high quality medical services but with lower cost, in order to balance their books.
Under these circumstances, some hospitals have tried to introduce the ideas of lean production system to their medical treatment processes. The essence of the lean concept is to provide good quality products or services with lower cost through the continuous business process improvement. When such lean concept is applied to medical services, the MCS (Management Control System) also has to be redesigned to support the lean operation of medical processes.