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Today’s world is filled with savvy consumers. They know how to find the best deals. They’re up on all the latest trends. If there’s a hot new product on the market, they don’t want to miss it. (Remember those iPhone lines!). A remarkable blend of exuberance and skepticism leaves many business…
This figure shows the 3-dimensional dose distribution of the prostate upon completion of implanted seeds. Based on patient tests, Lee’s inverse planning system uses 15% fewer seeds. Photo by Eva Lee A California medical software company has launched…
(FDA: Washington, D.C.) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently announced that manufacturers of certain drugs approved to treat Type 2 diabetes have agreed to add a stronger warning on the risk of heart failure, a condition that occurs when the heart does not adequately pump blood.…
(HHS: Washington D.C.) -- As part of the efforts to design and establish a public-private partnership to succeed the American Health Information Community by fall 2008, HHS has issued the final white paper describing the vision for and attributes of a successor to the AHIC. The purpose of the…
(ISO: Geneva) -- A new International Organization for Standardization technical report is aimed at reducing the number of patients harmed, or even killed, due to the misuse or malfunction of software for health care. In the past, health-related software was primarily applied to relatively…
(NCQA: Washington) -- Preferred provider organizations (PPOs), which cover nearly two-thirds of all privately insured Americans, will be required to report on the quality of care and service their members receive under standards that were released on Aug. 1 by the National Committee for Quality…
(Commonwealth Fund: New York City) -- As health care quality and patient safety concerns rise, the latest Commonwealth Fund health care opinion leaders survey finds leaders united behind several key reform measures: more than half (56 percent) support the creation of a new public-private…
As a regional director for loss prevention for the Marriott Corp. in the 1980s, I attended an “Insight To Time Management” seminar conducted by Charles Hobbs of Salt Lake City. The ideas in this article I got from that seminar and from more than 40 years of personal experience, with Marriott and…
(Tufco Technologies: Green Bay, Wisconsin) -- Tufco Technologies Inc., a provider of contract manufacturing and business imaging services, recently announced that as of July 20, its employees had worked 2 million consecutive hours without a lost-time injury at its Green Bay facility.“We have…
(ANSI: New York) -- Seven of the world’s leading retailers, including U.S.-based Wal-Mart, have agreed to rely upon food safety and quality management systems that have been certified as meeting rigorous standards for production, preparation, transport, storage, and handling. Agreed at a recent…
(ISO: Geneva) -- A new ISO technical report is aimed at reducing the number of patients harmed or killed due to the misuse or malfunction of software for health care. These incidents have affected the reputations of health organizations and led to substantial legal damages.In the past, health-…
(NIST: Gaithersburg, Maryland) -- Officials from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute recently signed a memorandum of understanding designed to expand significantly the scope of joint research and educational activities in…
I spent my June and July articles beating up on the “sigma” index commonly associated with Six Sigma (and continue to do so over in my discussion board.) Let me sum up by saying that, while not wrong, “sigma” isn’t an efficient metric for accomplishing what we are trying to do in today’s business…
Mitch Matheny, top, and Jon Krug (Nexenergy: Columbus, Ohio) -- Nexergy, a designer, integrator, and manufacturer of battery packs and chargers, recently announced that two of its manufacturing and quality engineers have earned the Six Sigma…
(SigmaFlow: Dallas, Texas) -- SigmaFlow, a leading provider of best practice execution software, recently announced that The United States Internal Revenue Service’s Wage & Investment Division has selected SigmaFlow’s project portfolio…
(Open Source Six Sigma: Scottsdale, Arizona) -- Open Source Six Sigma recently announced six new products in addition to their popular DMAIC v8.1, including the individual define, measure, analyze, improve and control phases as stand-alone products. In addition, OSSS will introduce a business…
Meet Chet, industrial engineer and manager of a small manufacturing department. He just came to this company a few months ago. This is his second job since graduation. He was a line supervisor for about a year at his previous company. He felt that job was too confining and prevented him from using…
(NQCA: Washington) -- Preferred provider organizations (PPOs), which cover nearly two-thirds of all privately insured Americans, will be required to report on the quality of care and service that their members receive under standards released today by the National Committee for Quality…
(ISO: Geneva) -- From national identity cards to security checks for air travel, a wide variety of biometric applications may now benefit from improved reliability and performance, thanks to the technologies described in a new technical report.Biometrics uses personal characteristics to…
(NQI: Toronto) -- The National Quality Institute will present the 2007 Performance Excellence Summit and the 23rd Canada Awards for Excellence in Toronto on Oct. 24, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.Special guests will include Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEOs of Research In Motion,…
If you have only $10,000 to improve your business, should you pour it into a marketing initiative or a performance initiative? I vote for improving performance every time. The long-term payback will be extraordinary.
The quality you provide to customers is the value that they receive from the…
(ANSI: New York) -- “Building Consumer Confidence” will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007, at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C. ANSI will bring together a broad spectrum of stakeholders to address concerns about consumer goods—particularly imports—and to develop a coordinated action plan…
In last month’s column, I talked about the accuracy funnel, which shows that in a measurement system where the sensor or the part is moved in one or more axes, the greater the distance, the larger the potential inaccuracies in the measured distance. In the case of an imaging system as used in a…
(GE Inspection Technologies: Billerica, Massachusetts) -- GE Inspection Technologies has signed a definitive agreement to acquire phoenix|x-ray, a high-resolution computed tomography (CT)/X-ray technology used in nondestructive testing (NDT) applications. The transaction, terms of which aren’t…
(Starrett: Athol, Massachusetts) -- The L. S. Starrett Co., a producer of precision measuring instruments, has acquired Kinemetric Engineering LLC for $2.3 million.Based in Laguna Hills, California, Kinemetric Engineering specializes in precision video-based metrology, specialty motion devices…
