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(Cognex Corp.: Natick, MA) -- Cognex Corp. has announced a new option to deliver its VisionView operator interface to third-party CE panels. VisionView CE software can now be licensed and installed directly onto Rockwell and Siemens CE panels, allowing end-users to use existing equipment and…
Pay-for-performance targets set for general practitioners in the United Kingdom are failing to improve the health of patients with high blood pressure, according to a joint study funded by U.K., U.S., and Canadian research organizations.
The study, which presents the strongest evidence yet that…
(Sparta Systems: Holmdel, NJ) – On Jan. 4, President Obama signed into law one of the most comprehensive changes to U.S. food safety since the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The Food Safety Modernization Act gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and related government agencies the…
Electron microscopes are among the most widely used scientific and medical tools for studying and understanding a wide range of materials, from biological tissue to miniature magnetic devices, at tiny levels of detail. Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)…
(National Quality Forum: Washington) -- Two new studies by the National Quality Forum (NQF) are designed to promote future work in clinical decision support (CDS) and expand the understanding of the benefits of health information technology (HIT) tools on care delivery.
The reports “lay the…
(ACSI: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Steady or improving customer satisfaction with several types of financial services is not enough to overcome the customer satisfaction challenges of the health insurance industry, according to a recent report released by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The…
U.S. health care organizations, from multihospital systems to rural community health centers, are gearing up for the challenge of their times: the effect of health care reform on how they care for patients and how they run their operations. Future health care organizations will need to find a way…
(Harvard Medical School: Boston) -- Researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMA) and Massachusetts General Hospital have found wide disparities among four common measures of hospitalwide mortality rates, with competing methods yielding both higher and lower-than-expected rates for the same…
Most Massachusetts physician groups are using results from a statewide patient survey to help improve patient experiences, but a significant number are not making use of the information or are making relatively limited efforts, according to a new RAND Corp. study.
Although physician…
(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- From newborns switched in the nursery to medication mix-ups and hospital-acquired infections, we are all familiar with the horror stories about hospital safety. The safety issue in U.S. hospitals has become so profound and embedded, that we cannot hope to fix it…
(Institute for Healthcare Improvement: Cambridge, MA) -- During Dec. 9–12, some 50 patient activist leaders travelled to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) National Forum on Quality Improvement in Orlando, Florida, to share experiences and consider ways to combine forces to be that…
(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- In the book Leading the Lean Healthcare Journey: Driving Culture Change to Increase Value (CRC Press, 2010), by Joan Wellman, Patrick Hagan, and Dr. Howard Jeffries, every health care organization can learn from Seattle Children’s Hospital’s continuous improvement…
(Productivity Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- What does the production line at a car manufacturer have to do with a doctor scrubbing in for brain surgery?
A lot, as it turns out.
For almost 10 years, Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle has adopted the essential principles of the Toyota…
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n his new book, Essentials for the Improvement of Healthcare Using Lean & Six Sigma (CRC Press, 2010), author Diomidis H. Stamatis (aka Dean) presents solutions to the problems that plague the health care industry by providing case studies and explaining a multitude of quality tools and…
The term “never events” refers to particularly shocking medical errors that should never occur (e.g., wrong-site, wrong-patient, wrong-procedure surgeries). There are other terms used in official capacities for such errors, but none have captured the nation’s attention or perhaps done more toward…
(Morehead: Charlotte, NC) -- Morehead, the human-capital research firm, will host a webinar titled “Secrets of a Winning Healthcare Organization.” The free hour-long webinar will be broadcast on Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2010 at 1 p.m. EST.
Rod Wilkes, senior vice president of Morehead’s Client…
(Connexall: Boulder, CO) -- Connexall, a leader in enterprise middleware for health care alarm management, lean-enabling workflow automation, and comprehensive reporting, is helping to improve patient satisfaction at one of the nation’s foremost cancer treatment facilities. The technology enables…
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ealth care reform, insurance changes, more insured patients, never events, changing reimbursements, accountable care organizations, medical home—what does it all mean? How do we react? How do we keep up with all the changes? The questions are many, and the answers are few, so what do we do…
William Barsan, M.D., chair and director of the U-M Department of Emergency Medicine.
(University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Clinical trials in which participants are randomly assigned to different treatments by design are the cornerstone of clinical…
(IHI: Cambridge, MA) -- The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is offering a virtual professional development program for middle managers, “Leading Quality Improvement: Essentials for Managers.” This in-depth event provides 11 one-hour sessions beginning Jan. 11 through Aug. 2, 2011, plus…
(The Quality Group: Atlanta, GA) -- The Quality Group (TQG) has announced the release of The Health Care Series, which is process improvement (lean Six Sigma) training for the health care professional. The newly developed blended e-learning series focuses on condensed class times and highly…
(National Quality Forum: Washington, D.C.) -- To improve health care safety, the National Quality Forum (NQF) has endorsed a framework for the public reporting of patient safety events. The framework provides guidance that will standardize an approach to capture and present information about a…
(Summit Optimization Group LLC: Lizella, GA) -- Summit Optimization Group LLC (Summit OG), a woman-owned consulting firm specializing in the implementation of process improvement methodologies, has announced HEART and HEARTRx for change management with new deployment strategies and leadership…
(Quantros: San Francisco) -- Quantros, a provider of clinically-focused data management and decision support solutions for the health care industry, demonstrated several new patient safety and quality improvement solutions at the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) Annual…
(CAP: Northfield, IL) -- Medical laboratories and health care organizations increasingly face the challenge of needing to do more with less. Yet, the expectation of continuous high quality patient care—which includes competitively priced fees—remains high. To help meet these expectations, the…
