Similar methods are now in place at other hospitals and health systems, including Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Park Nicollet Health Services in Minneapolis and Virginia Mason Medical Center, also in Seattle. So many others have called for advice that Seattle Children’s put together a two-day workshop, presenting it to more than 200 medical workers and health care leaders from the United States and Europe.

“Some people think they have to choose between quality of care and saving money,” said Dr. David Chand, who attended the training and now uses C.P.I. methods at Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio. “C.P.I. improves both patient outcomes and the hospital’s bottom line.”

To increase the number of surgeries the hospital could perform, Dr. Chand’s team spent about $20,000 overhauling the process to sterilize instruments, avoiding a $3.5 million expenditure to expand that department. More efficient scheduling in the M.R.I. department reduced the average waiting time for non-emergency M.R.I.’s from 25 days to 1 to 2.

All medical centers, especially larger ones, would have significant return on investment by using operations management techniques like C.P.I., says Eugene Litvak, president and chief executive of the Institute for Healthcare Optimization and an adjunct professor of operations management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

“The health care industry could be on the verge of an efficiency revolution, because it is currently so far behind in applying operations management methodologies,” says Professor Litvak.

TO be sure, not everyone believes that factory-floor methods belong in a hospital ward.

Nellie Munn, a registered nurse at the Minneapolis campus of Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, thinks that many of the changes instituted by her hospital are inappropriate. She says that in an effort to reduce waste, consultants observed her and her colleagues and tried to determine the amount of time each of their tasks should take. But procedure times can’t always be standardized, she says. For example, some children need to be calmed before IV’s are inserted into their arms, or parents may need more information.

“The essence of nursing,” she says, “is much more than a sum of the parts you can observe and write down on a wall full of sticky notes.”