| Summary: | As part of its mandate to optimize health outcomes for Veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has an incentive to improve the quality and safety of health care. Standardizing a process improvement methodology and training across the entire VA has the potential to expand resources for local improvement activities and improve the quality and efficiency of care delivery. Continuous quality improvement frameworks are system-level approaches to improving the quality and safety of health care through systematic data-guided activities, iterative development and testing of processes, and designing with local conditions in mind. Lean Management (Lean) has subsequently been applied to a variety of medical and industrial settings and is one of the most popular continuous quality improvement frameworks in health care settings. In December 2019, the Deputy Under Secretary for Health issued a directive outlining the deployment of a new VA-wide program for systems redesign and improvement. As part of this directive, Lean was designated as the primary process improvement methodology to be utilized across the VA.
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