 As healthcare makes the shift from a volume-driven industry to a value-driven one, the need to identify tools and practices that optimize patient outcomes over speed and efficiency alone is more critical than ever. In a recent study, researchers invited a team of healthcare professionals to try a visualization technique called makagami mapping. Borrowed from the workflow of the automobile manufacturing industry, makagami mapping provides organizations with a way to identify and eliminate sources of error in their day-to-day activities. The researchers showed that over the course of one year, the technique helped the team reduce errors in nurse scheduling by more than 90%, suggesting the technique's potential for improving the quality of healthcare. The operating theater is a critical and costly resource in the delivery of healthcare. Hospital finances, clinical effectiveness, and patient outcomes all depend on how efficiently an operating theater is run. An important part of keeping an operating theater running smoothly is making sure that the right staff members are doing the right job at the right place and time. Nurses, for example, must be assigned to the shifts where they will have the greatest positive impact on patient outcomes. That requires careful orchestration of shift lengths, scheduled hours per week, break times, skill sets, and experience levels, among many other factors. It's a complex process with ample room for errors to be made, but a simple visualization technique traditionally used in business could help healthcare professionals pinpoint and thereby eliminate the sources of those errors. Researchers asked a team of nine healthcare professionals working in an operating room of a teaching hospital to apply makagami mapping to nurse scheduling. Makagami mapping helps members of an organization understand how errors in a given work process can be eliminated through five main steps. In the current study, these steps were to determine how nurse scheduling in the operating room is currently done, decide how that process would be carried out under ideal circumstances, identify the sources of error in the current process, implement actions to resolve those errors, and remap the nurse scheduling process after those actions have been carried out. The map showing the current process revealed 35 sources of errors made in scheduling nurses. They were divided into three categories based on whether they were related to scheduling the right person, scheduling a nurse at the right place, or scheduling a nurse at the right time. The team addressed these 35 sources of error during bi-monthly meetings and within one year were able to reduce the number to two sources, a decrease of more than 90%. While the researchers are careful to stress that their findings are for the most part qualitative and specific to the process and institution they looked at, they do acknowledge that makagami mapping is useful in helping healthcare professionals visualize clinical practices and they expect the technique to have positive implications for quality of care.