Lean principles have recently come along with an emerging approach in healthcare systems for increasing the quality of care, reducing costs, and decreasing cycle time as well.

The aim of this study is to implement lean principles to the radiology department in one of the leading private hospital facilitating in İstanbul, Turkey. For this purpose, the project team constituted from patients’ right and quality councils has determined three main key performance indicators as cost, service quality, and cycle time in order to determine the efficiency improvement in the radiology department and also in the hospital within the multiplier effect.

A value stream map of the current state of radiology department has been formed through the use of information and data from field studies and measurements. Root cause analysis and PDCA method in the context of continuous improvement studies have been performed in order to eliminate wastes and improve efficiency. Accordingly, five main improvements have been realized in the hospital starting with the radiology department, expanding to the other departments. Correspondingly, the workflow was decreased to 7 steps, eliminating 7 non value added activities. Additionally, dramatic savings in printing costs, improvements in cycle time, and increasing in service quality have been realized.