News: Bob Elected President-Elect of Society for Health Systems

Bob Luttman is Principal Consultant with Robert Luttman & Associates, a healthcare management consulting practice specializing in clinical pathways, quality and performance measurement, process improvement, and total quality management.

His monograph, How to Design Clinical Pathways Variance Systems for Continuous Improvement, was published by the Center for Case Management. This book details Bob's pioneering thinking on variance management systems, work recognized around the world for its inventiveness.

Before founding RLA , Bob was Director of Management Engineering at Brigham & Women's Hospital, a Harvard affiliated Boston teaching hospital. In that capacity he developed and managed a well regarded internal management and quality consulting group. He was also instrumental in developing the clinical pathways program, quality measurement, clinical and operations improvements, and quality management.

Among his accomplishments at Brigham & Women's was re-engineering the inpatient Pharmacy process to utilize state-of-the-art medication dispensing machines that reduced annual costs $250,000 and reduced narcotic count and other medication errors.

While at Brigham & Women's Bob also helped develop a leading edge clinical pathways and variance management system that greatly improved the utility of clinical pathways and their impact on clinical process improvements. This system was part of an overall cost savings program that attained, among other savings, a 7% reduction in Cardiac Surgery charges over a two year period.

Bob has also worked to apply quality improvement in community and preventive health settings as well, serving as adviser to a community based team reducing injuries in elderly pedestrians in a suburban Boston community.

As a leading healthcare and quality management consultant Bob has written and presented extensively on a variety of topics including Statistical Process Control (SPC) in healthcare and organizational performance assessment. He is actively involved in regional and national organizations, currently serving as the Healthcare Chair of the Boston Section of the American Society for Quality Control. In the past he has served as President and Board Member of the New England Healthcare and Information Systems Society. Bob is also a Certified Examiner for the Massachusetts Quality Award, based on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

Bob has a BS in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan.