On the heels of another busy summer, the new president at Munson Medical Center (MMC) is convening a “rapid improvement team” to reimagine patient flow across the hospital. The long-term goal? “Zero wait” at the MMC emergency department (ED)

“It was our busiest summer ever, again,” says Megan Brown, Munson’s chief marketing and communications officer. Last summer, MMC tallied both its highest daily inpatient census in history (July 9, 2025, when 455 patients were lodged at the hospital) and its busiest day at the ED (July 14, when 193 patients were admitted).

This summer, Brown says, Munson’s inpatient numbers weren’t as high, but its ED traffic made up for it, increasing a whopping 6.2 percent. 

The summer rush was an eye-opening experience for Joe Du Lac, who stepped in as MMC president on June 22. Du Lac, who came to Traverse City from a stint as chief operating officer and system senior vice president for Battle Creek Hospital, says Munson’s traffic pattern is different from any other hospital system he’s ever worked for.

“Most health systems, the winter is the busy season, and the summer is the slow season,” Du Lac says. “It’s quite the opposite here.”

While the peak season is different, though, the challenges peak season brings are the same.

“As our inpatient capacity grows, it really blocks up people who were admitted to the ED from going upstairs [to the main hospital],” Du Lac explains. “It's really patient flow and the throughput of inpatient units that are causing the problem.”

Brown and Du Lac are both cognizant of social media chatter about long wait times at the MMC ED. While Brown says Munson is ahead of the national curve in some ways – patients who present to the ED are typically triaged “in 10 minutes or less,” and only 1.5 percent leave without being seen by a doctor, compared to the national average of 2 percent – other metrics aren’t as rosy. Brown admits Munson is pacing behind the national average for emergency room door-to-discharge time, of 2.5 hours. Du Lac acknowledges that Munson “had patients waiting up to 5-6 hours in our ED at the very busiest times” this summer.

Du Lac is bent on improving those numbers, and insists he has the background to get the job done. Before healthcare, Du Lac worked in the automotive industry, where he learned Lean Six Sigma. That popular process improvement methodology started in manufacturing and has since spilled into other industries.

“It’s really about process analysis and process improvement, and listening to the voice of the customer to meet what their expectations are,” Du Lac says of Lean Six Sigma. “So, for example, if a patient doesn't expect to wait when they come into the ED, it's incumbent upon us to provide a process to meet that expectation.”

Du Lac says he's “improved a lot of EDs and hospitals in terms of flow, throughput, and patient experience” using Lean Six Sigma. Now, he's rolling out a similar process at Munson. At the end of this month, Du Loc will convene a team of 60 individuals from across the MMC ecosystem, including physicians, nurses, frontline staff, and even IT staff. Together, they’ll work to map the entire patient experience at MMC in search of efficiency and quality gains.

“We'll map how the patient arrives and where they flow to, depending on their acuity and disease type. We’ll map how we handle the discharge process. And we’ll map everything in between,” Du Lac tells The Ticker. “We’ll be focusing on the technical factors, as to where we can remove waste and reduce wait times, but we're also focusing on patient touchpoints. Wherever we interface with a patient, we want to examine that interaction closely to make sure that the patient is receiving care to their expectations. The idea is to look at the whole process under a microscope.”

At Battle Creek Hospital, which Du Lac describes as “a touch smaller [than MMC], but with a higher patient volume,” he was tasked with addressing a near-identical problem with lengthy emergency room wait times.

“Within a year, we had solved the problem and removed those long wait times,” he says. “We heard immediately from our patient population about how pleased they were with the new the new ED processes. I hope to do the exact same thing up here.”

Long term, the goal is “zero wait time.” That doesn’t mean patients will be in and out of the ED within an hour, but it does mean creating a situation where patients are “continually receiving care” while in the ED. Du Lac likens it to cars flowing slowly but consistently through an area of heavy traffic, rather than being stuck in the erratic stop-and-go of a traffic jam.

“The hope is that patients don’t have to wait to go get an MRI, or wait for labs,” Du Lac says. “It's a continuous flow of all those processes. That’s what will help us reduce or remove those patient wait times, in the lobby or in our ED.”