The Healthcare industry forum addresses the major challenges and opportunities confronting the unique cultural, logistical, and process challenges of this industry. It has been designed for people interested in creating system-wide change in the healthcare system as it relates to cost, quality, and access. The ISSSP Healthcare Forum is composed of leaders throughout the healthcare system focused on creating strategic, system-wide change and fostering enterprise to enterprise partnerships.

The issues of cost, quality and access are complex and interrelated. The Healthcare Forum was founded on the belief that these issues are best addressed across the entire healthcare system and that Six Sigma and Lean are valuable tools toward this end. The format for the forum starts with a 15-minute long strategic view of healthcare and the ISSSP healthcare special interest group's strategic direction based on last years very successful forum. A continuum of that view and direction will be advanced using special group decision techniques to hone and refine the strategic intent and approach that will best benefit all of the participants.

The anticipated outcome will be a clear picture of the healthcare system/value chain issues, their contributors and the interrelated effects, which when addressed will leverage the rate of improvement within healthcare.

Following this outcome, there will be an extended group discussion and question-and-answer period. A strategic roadmap will then be presented to show how the complex interrelationships can be decomposed into a workable set of discrete efforts across the value chain.

A facilitator will then help identify the highest-interest topics which will allow topical focused dialog of unique interest to the individual participants using a round table discussion format. The outcome at a minimum is a set of common knowledge and approaches for broad scale improvements across the complete supply chain of the healthcare.