Monitoring and evaluation of Lean implementation in pediatric pharmacy: A study of mother and child hospital in Jakarta

Lean is a method of quality improvement that has been successfully implemented in healthcare context, including in the South East Asia. Lean promises inventory cost reduction if it is implemented in pharmacy department at hospital. This research assessed the successful lean implementation at children’s outpatient pharmacy of mother and child hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia. The hospital that was used as the research location had 20 outpatient policlinics and 63 beds. The implementation was performed by a cross-disciplinary team which had been trained in lean philosophy and implementation. The main procedure of lean implementation was 5S followed by kaizen. After one month of implementation, evaluation was performed on the inventory cost. It was reimplemented on the 2nd and 3rd month. The results showed that inventory cost reduces from US$ 22.494 to US$ 15.128 monthly. The components of cost that drastically reduced was medicine. Total saving in three months was US$ 22.097, while the implementation cost was US$ 3.733. Therefore, the benefit to cost ratio reached 592%. This research suggested that lean should be implemented in various pharmacy units of hospital by considering the availability of medicine supply for unexpected cases in the future. The results of the research also have socio-economic implications if it is implemented in a broad-scale of hospitals in developing countries. However, this research was still limited in terms of research location that was conducted at big city only and one parameter in determining the output. The future research should be conducted in underdeveloped areas with limited medicine supply and measuring output with several relevant parameters.