LeanGame, a digital training tool to implement lean philosophy

Abstract

One of the most important resource of successfully leaded and managed health care organization is a competent staff. As staff education requires resource investments such personnel’s’ and educators’ time, facilities and thus, typically it have to be funded somehow, money, it would be feasible to try to develop a new, more efficient and more motivating training methodologies and tools, in order to enhance learning outcomes. Health care has large amounts of employees, which gives border condition to tool to be also suitable for large amounts of people. As new digital technologies are available, they offer new ways to execute corporate wide professional training, e.g. serious games. This article presents a new approach to Lean training: a digital LeanGame. It is a digital serious game aimed to introduce basics of Lean Philosophy to health care professionals in hospital environment. Its future users, a group of health care professionals piloted LeanGame in Finnish hospitals in spring 2017. The results of this pilot study show that digital LeanGame can be used in a complementary way to achieve training goals in lean training. This article handles the results of lean game training and discusses of future research and development needs.