The Shingo Model: Healthcare’s Best Path to Sustainable Excellence

In healthcare, we’ve spent decades applying improvement tools (Lean, Six Sigma, Baldrige, High Reliability, and more) all in search of safer, higher-performing systems. And yet, even with noble effort and smart people, results often plateau. Why? 

Because sustainable excellence doesn’t come from tools. It comes from principle-based leadership organizational systems that deeply reflect those principles, and a deeply aligned culture. 

That’s why the Shingo Model matters now more than ever. And why Value Capture, as the only Shingo Institute Licensed Affiliate focused solely on healthcare, is committed to bringing it to life in hospitals and health systems across North America. 

What is the Shingo Model? 

Developed and researched by the Shingo Institute at Utah State University, the Shingo Model is a framework for organizational excellence that integrates principles, systems, and behaviors. It doesn’t replace Lean or other improvement tools; it strengthens and sustains them by rooting them in foundational, universal principles. And it isn’t just another flavor of the month. It’s not a brand name to become. It’s a framework to strengthen your organization’s own approach. 

At its core are ten Guiding Principles, including: 

• Respect Every Individual 

• Lead with Humility 

• Focus on Process 

• Assure Quality at the Source 

• Create Constancy of Purpose 

These are not slogans or abstract ideals. They create the basis for very specific behavioral imperatives that, when consistently modeled and reinforced by leaders, create the conditions for a deeply aligned, continuously improving culture. 

Why the Shingo Model is Critical for Healthcare 

Healthcare is fundamentally about people, and yet, the systems we’ve built often frustrate the very people they’re meant to serve. 

• Patient experience levels lag far short of what’s possible, and too many experience deep frustration. 

• More than 250,000 patients die annually from preventable harm in U.S. hospitals. 

• Clinician burnout is at crisis levels, with 50–60% of physicians and nurses reporting high emotional exhaustion. 

• Improvement efforts often stall or backslide because they lack cultural reinforcement effective support to improve the actual work, or the aligned support of the whole organization. 

The Shingo Model addresses these causes head-on. It provides a principle-based architecture to align purpose, empower people, and hardwire improvement into daily work, not as a project, but as a way of being. 

What Makes Value Capture Different? 

As mentioned earlier, Value Capture is the Shingo Institute’s only Licensed Affiliate focused solely on healthcare. That distinction matters. 

We don’t apply the Shingo Model in generic ways. We’ve designed our approach specifically for the complex, high-stakes, people-intensive nature of healthcare, and we integrate it with decades of experience coaching hospitals to eliminate harm, drive performance, and unlock human potential. 

We help healthcare organizations: 

✔️ Apply the Shingo Guiding Principles in real, operational terms, from the bedside to the C-suite. 
✔️ Build and reinforce leadership behaviors that create cultural alignment. 
✔️ Redesign management systems that support psychological safety, continuous learning, and accountability. 
✔️ Develop internal coaching capacity to sustain excellence long after our engagement. 
✔️ Pursue recognition through Shingo workshops, assessments, and the Shingo Prize process. 

We also offer on-site and regional Shingo workshops for healthcare teams, bringing the principles to life through interactive learning, real-world examples, and practical application. 

We’ve seen firsthand how the Shingo approach can catalyze deep, systemic change in healthcare. It’s not about adding another initiative; it’s about transforming the DNA of your organization.