Ever waited way too long at your doctor’s office for an appointment to start? Those long waits may soon be over. A schedule-optimizing software developed by MIT spinout Arsenal Health gets more patients seen more quickly and could soon be used by thousands of healthcare providers across the country.

The global food industry has never faced more challenges. From tainted dairy products to contaminated beef, high-profile cases crop up regularly to dent consumer confidence, while leading companies work hard to reclaim lost faith. So how trustworthy is your food?

Design controls and risk management processes should be tools to ensure that medical devices are designed, developed, and manufactured to be safe and effective, and to address indications for use, too.

In an earlier article, we discussed a pair of concepts—interoperability and connectivity—that are essential prerequisites for creating a successful national system for evidence generation (or “EvGen”). Here, we take a look at how we would apply these constructs as we go about building such a system.

The healthcare industry is in a state of constant change, and with change comes opportunity. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), healthcare providers are, or will be, paid differently for their services. No longer can they rely on the volume of services rendered to generate sustained income.

They sound like words and have a mysterious dignity rolling off the tongue. Their meanings seem both apparent and elusive. If an alien delegation landed on Earth, words like these might feature in their formal greetings. They are the most expensively researched neologisms in use around the globe.

What are they? Pharmaceutical brand names like Advil, Zantac, Lipitor, and Xolair. Azor, Exelon, Zostavax, and Chantix. Gardasil, Cubicin, Levemir, and Sensipar.

Across the clinical research enterprise, there is a growing awareness of serious shortfalls in the current model for generating the scientific evidence that supports medical product evaluation and clinical care decisions. As a result the FDA seeks to modernize methods and satisfy expectations surrounding this evidence base.

Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from the new book, Innovating Lean Six Sigma, by Kimberly Watson-Hemphill and Kristine Nissen Bradley.