Background: Surgical pathology laboratories have a main leading role towards diagnosis and management of patients. There is always a need to improve quality towin physician’s trust in pathology reports. In the recent decades, the emphasis on quality control and continuous process improvement has gained much more importance. These are the non-value added activities and unwanted or waste time.

Aim: To see the effect of implementing lean methodology to decrease the turnaround time of the gastrointestinal biopsies submitted to the surgical pathology laboratory of King Edward Medical University.

Methods: A total of 70 gastrointestinal endoscopic biopsies were evaluated turnaround time of 35 gastrointestinal biopsies submitted routinely to pathology reception. Then by using the principle of lean, we assessed next 35 gastrointestinal biopsies and identified non-value added time in our work flow process. The non-value added activities were recognized from the transportation of the sample till the dispatch of the final report.

Study design: Comparative cross sectional study.

Results: We evaluated the turnaround time of gastrointestinal biopsies by using value stream mapping. Before lean implementation, non-value added minutes were 6647 and the process cycle efficiency was 17.14%. After lean implementation the non-value added time was reduced to 510 minutes, which shows removal of 1885 non-value added minutes. Process cycle efficiency was 72.94%.

Conclusions: Lean principles can be used in a surgical pathology laboratory to remove the non-value added activities and to minimize the total turnaround time.