Building process improvement capacity in epidemiologic research operations: The Nurses' Health Study experience.

ABSTRACT: With declining infrastructure funding for large-scale epidemiologic cohort studies, continuous process improvement is essential to sustain research quality and impact. The authors recently undertook a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) training initiative with operational staff of the Nurses' Health Studies, among the longest-running and most productive cohort studies, to modernize operations and build internal capacity for process improvement. Twenty staff members across operational domains completed a structured LSS curriculum and three improvement projects: (1) reducing median turnaround time for medical record retrieval by 90%, (2) decreasing the proportion undeliverable questionnaires by 31%, and (3) cutting biweekly freezer maintenance time by 43 person-minutes per cycle, yielding an estimated 6.5

SUBMITTER: Bassett L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12668047 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature