Sustainability and Kaizen: Business Model Trends in Healthcare

Kaizen, or continuous improvement, is a management tool that allows the identification of activities that have no value in the processes examined. This identification leads to the improvement of these processes within any organization and promotes economic and social sustainability, and to a lesser extent environmental sustainability. Kaizen, already widely and successfully employed in the industrial sector, is now being applied in the health sector. However, the health sector tends to publish only the results of how processes have been improved in finely focused areas and the resulting benefits. The majority of the benefits focus on time and cost reduction. In this study, the authors carried out a bibliometric analysis using the Scimat program, which maps the thematic evolution of Kaizen in the health sector and its relationship with sustainability, in order to promote the interest of the health sector for this type of process improvement. The findings confirm that the implementation of Kaizen is recent and constantly evolves and grows, and that it can help economic and social sustainability, and to a lesser extent environmental sustainability.