Lean Enterprise Transformation Evaluation: Development and Psychometric Assessment of a Front Line Staff Survey

Radwin LE, Vashi A, Lerner BN, Urech TH, Kim B, Factor A, Gittens A, Charns MP. Lean Enterprise Transformation Evaluation: Development and Psychometric Assessment of a Front Line Staff Survey. Poster session presented at: Lean Healthcare Annual Academic Conference at Stanford; 2016 Sep 26; Stanford, CA.

Background: VA's National Veterans Engineering Resource Center (VERC) Office is implementing a national program of Lean Enterprise Transformation (LET) to implement Lean Management Systems and transform organizational culture and practices. An evaluation is underway to assess transformation in 10 pilot sites. As part of this evaluation, frontline staff will be surveyed annually to assess perceptions of LET implementation and track LET maturity and transformation over time. To date, no survey exists to meet this need. Our objective is to develop and psychometrically assess a survey to address this gap. Survey Development: Unique survey items were generated to operationalize 13 driver concepts based on the LET Maturity Matrix and Organizational Transformation Model. The project team evaluated an original set of 130 items for relevance and made revisions. Content validity of the resultant items was assessed using a seven-member panel of Lean and survey experts and frontline staff. The team then reviewed and prioritized the items. A 40-item survey resulted. A web-based version will be pilot tested among 10,000 frontline staff in the VA New England Healthcare Network. The final item set will be determined using item-level and total scale descriptive statistics. Factor analysis with criterion fit statistics will be used to assess construct validity. Outcomes: The final survey will be fielded in the 10 pilot LET implementation sites and 20 comparison sites. Psychometric properties of the scale will be evaluated via annual survey administration; differences between pilot and comparison sites will be tracked over time.