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INTRODUCTIONIn this column, we provide an example of a Lean Six Sigma project in health care. The setting was Deventer Hospital in The Netherlands and the cardiology department in particular. It concerns a project to improve the quality of care for outpatients and at the same time to achieve a more efficient allocation of resources and hence increase the hospital's revenues. The specific process of interest is diagnosing new cardiovascular patients and conducting checkups on existing cardiovascular patients. The hospital's objective to provide faster and easily accessible care was translated into a concrete project objective, namely, to shorten the admission time (for new patients) and the throughput time of the cardiac consultation pathway.At the time the project was initiated, the cardiology team felt that they were operating in a high-pressure work environment, which was expected to increase as a result of an aging population and earlier recognition as a result of the increasing diagnostic possibilities, for example, for a general practitioner. A more efficient allocation of resources would be needed to improve working conditions and meet the challenge of a higher patient admission rate. These findings fueled the second project objective, namely, to improve the efficiency of resource utilization and, in doing so, increase the number of patients treated and revenue earned.Before we discuss the project in greater detail, some background information on the project setting and the Lean Six Sigma program is given in the next section. The following five sections apply the Lean Six Sigma methodology to an improvement project in the cardiac outpatient clinic. The final section offers some concluding remarks.