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This is one of the first questions that executives always ask me. Because it is a broad question, the answer is often challenging. I usually respond with a few examples that have been gathered in Juran Institute’s 20-year benchmarking practice database, such as Company A is this, and Company B is…
American Sentinel University
Critical care units at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, New York, were faced with a formidable task. They had applied to receive the Beacon Award for Critical Care Excellence, a distinction given only to the top intensive care units in the United States. One of the components on…
Mike Richman
Welcome to Quality Digest Daily 2.0! This new format represents a significant re-imaging of our flagship brand (the industry’s only daily newsletter), which we first launched nearly two years ago. I hope you notice that we’ve added more video content to the newsletter as well as greater editorial…
Danita Johnson Hughes Ph.D.
Read this. It won’t be a waste of time.
Time gets lost. People kill time. Time flies. It gets wasted. Time weighs heavy on our hands. We spend time. Time passes. It drags on or it hurries by. Those behind bars are said to be doing time. Sometimes, we have no time left; we’re out of time.…
In business there’s a saying: Time is money. The more time it takes for something to get done, the more money is wasted. Companies that can figure out a way to compress the time it takes for something to happen can realize significant cost savings and also get their products into the market faster…
Pierre Huot
If a manufacturer were to ask its clients how they evaluated goods or services, the three most common metrics would be goods at a fair price, on-time delivery, and quality. Ask which could be most valuable and in all likelihood the most significant response would be quality. When included in the…
Georgia Institute of Technology
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a new sampling device that could prevent thousands of people worldwide from dying of pneumonia each year.
Called PneumoniaCheck, the device created at Georgia Tech, is a solution to the problem of diagnosing pneumonia, which is a…
Claudia Jackson
Twitter is not at all what I expected. After a few months, I now use Twitter to improve my knowledge in health care quality, expand my professional network, and save time. Through Twitter, I’ve connected with an amazing variety of people, including health care providers, marketing pros, e-patients…
Barbara A. Cleary
A young man in PQ Systems' hometown survived a dramatic auto accident last summer in which police-captured video footage of his spectacular, airborne vehicle was broadcast throughout the nation. That was just the beginning of his problems, for during his hospitalization, his medical records were…
A new year always brings new hope, new plans, and new perspectives. While looking ahead is the most direct route to progress, looking back is essential to understanding the present. After all, the past creates the consequences that will shape the future.
With this in mind, the editors of…
Mike Richman
A recent article appearing in the Quality Digest Daily e-newsletter (“Why Lean? Why Now?” by Dean Bliss http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/health-care-news/why-lean-why-now.html) discusses the value of lean in a health care setting. In his editorial, Bliss writes about the manufacturing origins…
It is no secret that the health care industry is undergoing revolutionary changes. Are you responding by re-evaluating your approach to process improvement? In a world where doing more work with fewer resources is the norm rather than the exception, now is the right time to update your own work…
Mark Graban
Lean thinkers see the waste in health care when they are at the hospital gemba. I think this is true whether you are a lean person who is new to health care or if you’re a long-time hospital person who has learned lean. Experts (doctors) ranging from John Toussaint to Patricia Gabow to Don Berwick…
Melanoma is one of the less common types of skin cancer, but it accounts for the majority of skin cancer deaths (about 75%). The five-year survival rate for early-stage melanoma is high (98%), but the rate drops precipitously if the cancer is detected late or there is recurrence.
So a great…
The QA Pharm
One of the regulatory responsibilities of the quality control department is the release decision for drug batches into the market. When I was first given that responsibility early in my quality assurance (QA) career, it was impressed upon me to not count the cost of the batch when making that…
National Association for Healthcare Quality
The Toyota Production System and U.S. health care improvement share a long history. What lessons can health care leaders learn from Toyota’s recent production troubles? A few experts recently discussed this on WIHI, an audio program sponsored by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). Here…
Michele DeMeo
A surgical technician prepares her back table for the next laparoscopic surgery. Instruments are removed from their containers and packages, and placed neatly on the back table. Chemical indicators show that sets and instruments are sterilized; the patient is prepped. The surgeon begins the…
(Academy Leadership Publishing: King of Prussia, PA) -- When news headlines trumpet story after story about fiscal mismanagement, unchecked greed, massive bankruptcies, and rampant downsizing, it’s hard to believe there’s any good news about the business world. Indeed, it’s almost impossible not…
Tony Shaw
A woman in Southern California’s Inland Empire, age 53, is suffering from an unidentified neurological disorder. It started as an odd numbness in her left arm, and now she feels an uncomfortable, persistent tingling and prickling pain from the bottom of her feet to the top of her eyebrows. She…
Leaders of quality assurance programs must be able to generate interest and commitment without burdening clinical and administrative staff with an activity they neither understand nor believe in.
Hospital accreditation has been defined as “A self-assessment and external peer assessment process…
NIST
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program (VACSP) Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center (the Center) is a federal government organization that supports multicenter clinical trials targeting current health issues for America’s veterans. Located in Albuquerque, New…
Georgia Institute of Technology
The cross-functional team at Piedmont Newnan was made up of employees that deal with the process daily. For this process improvement project, they focused on case carts, which are used for pulling together all supplies needed for surgical procedures.
Pam Murphy, a…
Knowledge at Wharton
Toyota’s legendary lean processes didn’t come out of nowhere. They were forged by the fire of urgency in post-World War II Japan when resources were scarce. Toyota innovated—and continued to innovate. Today, the Toyota Production System is the most respected manufacturing and inventory control…
redOrbit
With a silicone rubber “stick on” sheet containing dozens of miniature, powerful lenses, engineers at Harvard are one step closer to putting the capacity of a large laboratory into a microsized package.
The marriage of high-performance optics with microfluidics could prove the perfect match for…
Mark Graban
When I was in Sweden recently, we had a lot of good discussion about the lean concept of “standardized work.”
There was much agreement from different presenters at the lean laboratories conference, and from the hospital people we visited, concerning standardized work—that it isn’t a robotic…
