How to reduce waste in health services through Lean thinking?

The attempts to implement tools and techniques aimed at reducing or eliminating waste and consequently moving towards a process of continuous quality improvement of services provided to users have aroused greater interest among academics and health sector leaders with the adoption of Lean thinking since the 2000s. To analyze the trend of published studies on Lean thinking in the health sector identifying their contribution and propose some lines for future investigations. The results are derived from a systematic literature review of articles published in scientific journals from the Web of Science (ISI) electronic database between January 2007 and February 2017. The research process resulted in a total of 30 articles subsequently analyzed in depth.