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Quality Digest
(NCQA: Washington) -- Five new measures of health care effectiveness were recently added to HEDIS, the most definitive set of health care quality measures in the United States.Among the additions unveiled today by the National Committee for Quality Assurance is a set of measures that will allow…
Quality Digest
(ANSI: New York) -- The increasing number of liquid biofuels standards initiatives and the growing market demand for alternative energy sources are fueling the need for the harmonization of standards and test methods to support the commoditization of liquid biofuels throughout the supply chain.To…
Quality Digest
(University of Virginia: Charlottesville, Virginia) -- University of Virginia Engineering School Associate Professor William F. Walker and Research Associate Francesco Viola have developed a new tool—an advanced imaging algorithm—that is transforming the way we see things. Together with graduate…
Quality Digest
The National Quality Forum is seeking nominations for members of a steering committee for the initial phase of a project to endorse voluntary consensus standards on the quality of emergency care. All nominations must be submitted by 6:00 p.m. ET, Aug. 10, 2007.Emergency care is an integral part…
Quality Digest
(Systech: Cranbury, New Jersey) -- Systech International Inc., a provider of packaging execution systems (PES) to the pharmaceutical industry, has introduced enhanced features to its plant-level server application, Systech Guardian. In addition to serialized product tracking (SPT)…
CardioMEMS engineer Michael Fonseca uses a laser to separate pressure sensors in the company’s clean room facility in the ATDC Biosciences Center located at Georgia Tech’s Environmental Science and Technology Building. Photo by Gary Meek After…
Quality Digest
(Productivity Press: New York) -- Why does the United States rank 36th of all industrialized nations in health care? Perhaps the rampant inefficiencies of the system can help explain this dismal placement. There are bright spots, however. Innovative health care organizations, having recognized…
Quality Digest
(NCQA: Washington) -- The National Committee for Quality Assurance, in collaboration with Pfizer Inc., recently released a new publication profiling strategies and recommendations for improving the quality of care through wellness and prevention initiatives.Quality Profiles: The Leadership Series—…
Quality Digest
(ASQ: Milwaukee) -- Public attention has been focused as perhaps never before on the safety of the food supply as a result of recent high-profile outbreaks of illness linked to various foods.According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a rare strain of Salmonella in…
Quality Digest
(ASQ: Milwaukee) -- The American Society for Quality recently awarded its 2007 Richard A. Freund International Scholarship to Denisa Olteanu of Blacksburg, Virginia.Named after Richard A. Freund, a past president of the American Society for Quality, this $5,000 scholarship has been awarded for…
Bipin Roy
Story update 11/1/2010: We had the incorrect author shown for this story. The author is Bipin Roy.
Welcome to the information technology world of governance boards, compliance councils, Sarbanes Oxley, and audit committees that continually invent stringent rules and regulations to make the…
Quality Digest
(ISO: Geneva) -- The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) recently took another step toward ensuring the safety of food products for consumers with its ISO 22005 standard on traceability in the feed and food chain, the latest addition to the ISO 22000 series on food-management…
Quality Digest
Wireless customers who called too often to complain, fish for information about other customers, or otherwise take up the time of customer-care representatives at Sprint are finding themselves with a cancellation-of-services notice.Sprint, the third-largest wireless services provider in the…
Steven Ouellette
Last month I talked about the “sigma” index and how it can be used. So what could be bad about the “sigma” index?Never forget that metrics drive behavior and that people are very, very good at finding a way to succeed when given a goal. It just may not be the thing you wanted them to do. If “sigma…
Quality Digest
(SME: Dearborn, Michigan) -- The Society of Manufacturing Engineers, the Association for Manufacturing Excellence, and the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing have conferred upon Jeff Lytle, lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt at OMNOVA Solutions Inc., the first-ever lean Gold…
Quality Digest
(WCBF: New York) -- Worldwide Conventions and Business Forums’s 5th Conference on Successfully Implementing Six Sigma in Financial Services, taking place Sept. 25–27, 2007 in New York, will enable participants to benchmark and network with peers, listen to business leaders, and hear practical…
Quality Digest
(JMP: Cary, North Carolina) -- SAS, a provider of business intelligence and advanced analytics, has closed an agreement with publishing group W.H. Freeman to bundle JMP Student Edition, a streamlined version of its JMP statistical discovery software, with leading statistics textbooks sold through…
Quality Digest
(NCQA: Washington) -- The National Committee for Quality Assurance, in collaboration with Pfizer Inc., recently released a new publication profiling strategies and recommendations for improving the quality of care through wellness and prevention initiatives.Quality Profiles: The Leadership…
David Schwinn
We recently lost two great American authors, Kurt Vonnegut and David Halberstam. I liked them because they told the truth. At least their truth agreed with my truth, and it seems like the truth of a great many other people.I first became aware of Kurt Vonnegut in my late teens, a time when I…
Quality Digest
(Hewlett-Packard: Cupertino, California) -- Hewlett-Packard has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SPI Dynamics Inc., a provider of Web-application security assessment software and services.Application quality management ensures that business systems, such as E-commerce Web sites or…
Quality Digest
(Dyadem: Toronto) -- Dyadem recently announced an enterprise solution that helps manufacturers manage quality throughout the life cycle of a product. Stature is enterprise-quality life-cycle management software that allows stakeholders from design to manufacturing to collaborate in real time and…
Quality Digest
(ACSI: Ann Arbor, Michigan) -- Citizen satisfaction with federal Web sites registered a slight improvement, according to the second quarter report from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Government Satisfaction Index. The E-commerce and transactions…
Quality Digest
(ARTEL: West Brook, Maine) -- Yellowstone National Park has been selected as the location for Mission No. 2 of the ARTEL’s Extreme Pipetting Expedition. At Yellowstone, ARTEL will test how pipetting liquids at a temperature different than the pipette (thermal disequilibrium) affects delivered…
Quality Digest
(Sypris: Orlando, Florida.) -- Sypris Test & Measurement Inc., a subsidiary of Sypris Solutions Inc., has partnered with Tektronix to provide onsite calibration services for products from multiple vendors. The combined offerings of the two firms provide onsite calibration support for more…
Quality Digest
(Beamex: Marietta, Georgia ) -- Computer-aided calibration management is becoming more and more common for managing calibration information and calibration assets in the process industry. Tough requirements set by regulatory authorities and quality systems, the need for improving calibration-…