Laura Winner, B.S.N., M.B.A.
Lean Six Sigma Deployment Leader
Johns Hopkins Medicine
Baltimore, Maryland

Laura Winner, B.S.N., M.B.A., is the director of the Lean Six Sigma Program for the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System in Baltimore, Maryland. In this role she has overseen the introduction and launch of the Lean Six Sigma Program including training and project mentoring of more than 150 health care Green Belts since 2004. Winner is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and serves as faculty for the Lean Sigma Prescription for Healthcare® course. She completed Green Belt training with General Electric and Black Belt training and certification through Motorola.

Winner has been applying Six Sigma tools in health care since 2000.  In her role in the Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care, Winner has worked closely with infection control practitioners and clinicians on many initiatives to reduce infection, specifically surgical site infection and catheter-related blood stream infection.  The Center for Innovation is also actively involved with infection control practitioners in efforts currently underway to improve hand hygiene.

Winner’s publications include: 

• “Elimination of Catheter-Associated Bloodstream Infections in Pediatric Patients: Experimentation and Reality,” Pediatric Critical Care Medicine 2008 Jan;9(1):40-6.
• “How will we know patients are safer?  An Organization-wide approach to Measuring and Improving Patient Safety,” Pronovost, P. Baker, D., Winner, L., Critical Care Medicine 2006, Vol. 34, No. 7
• “Healing Healthcare,” iSixSigma Magazine, Interview with Elaine Schmidt, January/ February 2008
• “No Time to Waste: Decreasing patient wait times for chemotherapy administration using automated prioritization in an Oncology Pharmacy System,” American Journal of Managed Care 2008 May; 14(5):309-16.

Winner holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from The Johns Hopkins University, an M.B.A. from the Business of Medicine program at The Johns Hopkins University School of Professional Studies and has a joint appointment with the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing.  She has more than ten years of clinical nursing experience at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Emergency Nursing and Cardiology.