About this Presentation
Dr Christopher Strear, author of Smash the Bottleneck: Fixing Patient Flow for Better Care, who just by reading the Goal, applied the 5 Focusing Steps to a hospital and within months got major improvement in patient flow.
What Will You Learn
To help you get the most value from this session, we’ve highlighted a few key points. These takeaways capture the main ideas and practical insights from the presentation, making it easier for you to review, reflect, and apply what you’ve learned.
Even large, complex programs can begin to show measurable improvement within a focused 90-day period when teams concentrate effort on the true constraint rather than local tasks.
A disciplined turnaround cycle creates urgency and structure that help teams strip away low-value activities and prioritize actions that unlock measurable flow gains.
Early wins help build confidence and alignment, but maintaining momentum requires consistent routines, transparent metrics, and governance that reinforces new behaviors.
Embedding simple execution habits—such as daily priority reviews and buffer tracking—helps sustain improvement and prevent regression to old patterns once the initial surge passes.
Instructor(s)
Christopher Strear, MD, MBA, FACEP
Dr. Strear is a board certified emergency physician and Chief Medical Officer of Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria, Oregon. Dr. Strear has led patient flow initiatives utilizing TOC applications at multiple hospitals and health systems with outsized results. He has co-authored the book "Smash the Bottleneck: Fixing Patient Flow for Better Care" with Danilo Sirias and published the first application of TOC in North America to an inpatient healthcare setting.
Sanjeev Gupta
Most recently, Sanjeev Gupta was the CEO of Vulcan Mozambique, Africa’s largest coal mine. Within the first 90 days, he led impressive improvements in profitability, mining production, and logistics, setting the mine on a path to sustained success. Sanjeev’s journey in turnarounds began early in his career at Xerox, a Fortune 100 company, where, as a junior manager, he turned around its worst-performing factory and made it the best-performing one. This initial success led him to found Throughput Technologies, where his team provided software based on the Theory of Constraints for factories. He worked with companies ranging from $5 million to $5 billion, improving throughput by 20% to 50% and reducing lead times by over 50%.
He later founded Realization Technologies, offering similar software and consulting services for project-based organizations. There, he achieved comparable throughput improvements, with lead time reductions varying between 25% to 75%. His clients included organizations such as ABB, BHP Billiton, Boeing, L & T, Medtronic, Siemens, and the U.S. Armed Forces (Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, and Navy). Sanjeev is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Virginia Tech, and Carnegie Mellon University.