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Management practices, including, for example, “Lean” methodologies originally developed at Toyota, may represent one mechanism for improving healthcare performance.

We surveyed 597 nurse managers at cardiac units to score management on the basis of poor, average, or high performance on 18 practices across 4 dimensions (Lean operations, performance measurement, targets, and employee incentives). We assessed the relationship of management scores to hospital characteristics (size, non-profit status) and market level variables.

Our findings provide concrete examples of the high degree of management proficiency of some hospitals, as well as wide variation in management practices. Although the exact ways in which these tools have been implemented vary across hospitals, we identified multiple examples of units that use standardization in their care, track performance on …