A nurse refuses to help an ailing alcoholic who is upset to find a hospital detox unit closed. A hospital clerk brushes off a deceased woman’s grieving family as they try to pay her bills and claim her belongings.

To improve quality, the most effective hospitals and leaders focus on processes and systems, instead of just lecturing and cajoling their employees and physicians to do better. W.

Hospital-acquired infections, ventilator-acquired pneumonia, patient falls, and similar events are (hopefully) rare enough to promote discussion of control charts for rare events.

As a 2011 recipient of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit has achieved recognition as a top-performing organization for excellence in innovation, efficiency, and quality improvement.

Humble leaders are more effective and better liked, according to a study forthcoming in the Academy of Management Journal.

I attended a gathering of health care providers recently to participate in a site review and listen to some nice Toyota Production System (TPS) success stories.

I was playing around with the power and sample size graphs in Minitab recently, and I noticed something interesting. Power, for the uninitiated, is usually described as the likelihood that you will find a significant effect or difference when one truly exists.

A first-of-its-kind framework released Dec. 6, 2011, offers recommendations to food and food packaging companies on how to identify and evaluate nanomaterials in products.

Many times measurements are made using measurement increments which are too large for the job. Fortunately this problem is easily detected by ordinary, production-line process behavior charts.

The latest edition of “The ISO Survey of Certifications—2010,” from the International Organization f