39Batching vs. Lean Thinking andFlow
The nursing staff typically has little or no visibility into the status of their patient’s orders in the
laboratory queue. This creates the need for many phone calls by the frustrated clerical and nursing
staff to follow up on their patient’s results. Because these queues develop as a result of the batching,
we have to design STAT processes to handle those orders that are critical in order to ensure these
orders are processed rst during peak demand periods. We thus create STATS not for patient needs,
but for staff and process needs. This further bottlenecks the system and leads to more STATS, fur-
ther adding to the problem.
Peak demand is a phenomenon that also happens outside healthcare. For example, restaura ...