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AssurX
Last month an investigative report revealed that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has millions of “hidden” serious injury and malfunctions reports on medical devices. According to the report from Kaiser Health News, “Since 2016, at least 1.1 million incidents have flowed into the…
Matthew M. Lowe
Despite the life science industry’s infatuation with modernity and trend chasing, even its most forward-thinking organizations have struggled to fully digitize and integrate their operations.
Yet, while the industry lags behind most other sectors in implementing business-streamlining digital…
Tara García Mathewson
Once students learn how to sound out words, reading is easy. They can speak the words they see. But whether they understand them is a different question entirely. Reading comprehension is complicated. Teachers, though, can help students learn concrete skills to become better readers. One way is by…
Robyn Metcalf
In an outbreak that has now run for more than 28 months, at least 279 people across 41 states have fallen ill with multidrug-resistant Salmonella infections linked to raw turkey products. Federal investigators are still trying to determine the cause. In response to food company recalls, more than …
Matthew M. Lowe
It’s human nature to resist change, and the life sciences industry is not exempt from a change-averse mindset. The proof: Life science organizations (LSOs) lag far behind counterparts in other sectors in implementing digital technologies that are designed to streamline business and manufacturing…
Chip Bell
Parking lot. We use it in the meeting-management world to mean agenda items that are tabled for later discussion. These are generally posted on a sheet of flip-chart paper, taped on the meeting wall, and then placed on the agenda of the next meeting so they are not forgotten as topics for…
Vaishali Gopi
Customer experience has become pivotal to growth and profitability strategies of businesses worldwide. There is now a deeper understanding of customer experience as an incredibly important piece in the success (or failure) of any brand. Research states that by 2020, customer experience will…
Pierre Chandon
Whether you love or hate his work, Andy Warhol eating a Whopper for 45 seconds during one of the most expensive ad slots in television this year was astonishing.
Super Bowl Sunday—the most macho of American sporting events—coupled with the quintessential pop artist had people talking the morning…
Annette Franz
Core values are the fundamental beliefs of an organization; they guide executives and employees in identifying which behaviors and actions are right and which are wrong. Everything you do must be aligned with your core values, and core values should be integrated into everything you do. When in…
NIST
A new measurement approach proposed by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) could lead to a better way to calibrate computed tomography (CT) scanners, potentially streamlining patient treatment by improving communication among doctors.
The approach, detailed in…
Chanice Henry
According to CX Network’s latest “Annual Global State of CX Report,” showing return on investment (ROI) from customer experience (CX) projects is one of the top challenges troubling CX practitioners.
The report saw nearly 270 responses from the CX community, with each participant providing insight…
Bruce Hamilton
Last February I had the opportunity to observe healthcare providers up close and personal at one the world’s premier hospitals. “Who Cares for the Caregivers?” was written from the perspective of a patient in a cardiac step-down unit, sympathetically watching caregivers as they grappled with many…
Shobhendu Prabhakar
Historically, conventional wisdom among business managers was that the higher the quality, the higher the cost. This perception still holds true today among a few business managers. Common sense also tells us the same thing, i.e., to create higher quality products or services, organizations will…
Hubert Gatignon
Health and economics are linked in more ways than just health insurance. When we look past the obvious, research shows us how brain scans, the gig economy, or even hospital queues are all part of the expanding domain of health economics.
Recently, professors and researchers from the Sorbonne…
Jon Speer
You arrive at work one morning, and there are FDA inspectors sitting in your waiting area. If you are lucky, you may be notified ahead of time that they’re coming, but otherwise, the US. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is fully within its rights to show up unannounced at any time.
Because of…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Life science companies are no strangers to data, so it would be easy to assume they are adept at making innovative use of huge amounts. Not necessarily. A tradition of rigorous scientific method and clinical trial hasn’t prepared them for the shifting inundation of big data or all its baffling…
Dirk Dusharme
For centuries, medical procedures, prescriptions, and other medical interventions have been based largely on experience—what is known about a set of symptoms. The doctor looks at those symptoms, tests you in various ways (blood tests, X-rays, MRIs), and interprets the results based on experience…
Nicole Radziwill, Graham Freeman
In 2013, thousands of consumers in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland bought, prepared—and ate—beef lasagna, hamburgers, and frozen dinners. What they didn’t know is what they were actually putting in their mouths.
Although a burger is only required by law in that region to contain 47-percent…
Kelly Kuchinski
Imagine building a brand over decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested in design and development. Sponsorships with celebrity athletes and professional and college teams. Leading-edge marketing making your company one of the top 20 brands in the world. It only takes one incident to unravel…
Lee McIntyre
The life choices that had led me to be sitting in a booth underneath a banner that read “Ask a Philosopher” at the entrance to the New York subway at 57th and 8th were perhaps random but inevitable.
I’d been a “public philosopher” for 15 years, so I readily agreed to join my colleague Ian Olasov…
Rachel Plotnik
All day every day, throughout the United States, people push buttons—on coffee makers, TV remote controls, and even social media posts they “like.” For more than seven years, I’ve been trying to understand why, looking into where buttons came from, why people love them—and why people loathe them.…
Zach Y. Brown
Imagine there was a store where there were no prices on items, and you never knew what you’d pay until you’d picked out your purchases and were leaving the shop. You might be skeptical that the store would have any incentive to offer reasonable prices.
This exact situation has become the norm in U…
Annette Franz
In the past, I’ve written about some of the myths of journey mapping. One of those myths is: Without a digital mapping platform, I can’t even begin to map. Let me explain my position.
You probably know by now that I’m an advocate of digitizing your maps, for a variety of reasons, not the least of…
Stephen McCarthy
I am thrilled to introduce Quality Digest’s special report, “Unlocking the Future of Life Sciences.” This series explores the last several decades of quality management within the life sciences industry. It begins with the genesis of early regulations, shows us how that led to the current state of…
Mike Richman
Great quality is pretty much the same everywhere, but the cost of poor quality is not equivalent from industry to industry. For example, it’s conceivable (but I hope not probable) that this article may turn out to be a real bomb, or worse, a complete snoozer. What’s the cost of that poor quality?…