Quality Digest

During a recent trip to the great state of Texas, I heard some down-home wisdom: “Before you season your food, why don’t you taste it first?” The person who uttered that question was not talking about food. Rather, he was challenging someone who was a little too hell-bent on changing something without truly understanding it.

Sound familiar?

The 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winners were announced last week, and for the first time, three recipients are in the health care category.

The recipients of the 2011 Baldrige Award are:

When the Japanese word kaizen entered the language of quality improvement via Masaaki Imai’s seminal book, Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success, (McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 1986), the author defined kaizen as “ongoing improvement involving everyone.” In a 2011 video posted on YouTube, Imai reinforced that kaizen means “everyday

First, the introduction. This post was earnestly written by my friend, Jeff Fuchs. He’s the director of the Maryland World Class Consortia, a lean nonprofit assistance organization in the mid-Atlantic. He’s also president of Neovista Consulting, which works with large and small organizations on lean, leadership, and organizational change.

Finally, the medical industry is putting aside its “We’re medicine; we’re different” mindset and taking a more practical look at quality improvement. Bravo! Although an element of physician culture remains convinced that improvement is all about outcomes and double-blind clinical trials, the executive culture at least has become so well-versed in quality jargon they can now use it to disguise a cost-cutting program. They’ve caught up with the rest of American management.

Dr. Gary Brandeland’s article, “The Day Joy Died,” which appeared in the Oct. 20, 2006, edition of Modern Medicine, underscores the primitive nature of quality thinking—and more specifically, safety thinking—in hospitals.

Sseems the Diet Police are once again running rampant in our nation. It has been said that close to 30 percent of Michigan residents are overweight, and thus there is a movement afoot to curtail our eating habits, not only in that state but also nationally. Believe it or not, there is some discussion about removing obese children from their parents so that some nutritionist can instill sound eating habits into the youngsters.

After reading Joe De Feo’s July 8, 2011, Quality Digest Daily article, “A Positive Prognosis: Transforming Health Care in America,” I took another look at the wonderful book, Escape Fire (Jossey-Bass, 2003), a compendium of Dr.

In the U.S. health care system, quality and safety have developed into strategically important issues. Progress is being made at the local level, even if it is slow and doesn’t get much of the public’s attention. Health care improvement has certainly come a long way since the early 1990s, when an improvement resolution took shape, thanks in part to the efforts of the National Demonstration Project on Quality Improvement in Healthcare, with Dr. Don Berwick (then from Harvard Community Health) and Blanton Godfrey, CEO of Juran Institute.

With the explosive growth in imported goods to the United States, what is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doing toward maintaining a level of service inspection that ensures the best protection of the public health? One option is to partner with the countries exporting the supplies.