All Features
Mark R. Hamel
During a recent trip to the great state of Texas, I heard some down-home wisdom: “Before you season your food, why don’t you taste it first?” The person who uttered that question was not talking about food. Rather, he was challenging someone who was a little too hell-bent on changing something…
News-Medical.Net
Japanese vehicle manufacturer, Toyota, is well-known for developing the principles of lean manufacturing. Research published in the International Journal of Technology Management suggests that the lean approach might also be beneficial to medical procedures, making hospitals more efficient and…
Davis Balestracci
I recently attended the annual forum of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), which is probably the leading health improvement organization in the world. The forum has grown from under 100 attendees in 1989 to almost 6,000 this year—half of whom were there for the first time—with now…
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
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. A charge nurse keeps the mother of gunshot victim from seeing her son, saying the…
Mark Graban
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. Edwards Deming famously stated that the problem with posters and exhortations was that “they take no account of the…
William A. Levinson
Hospital-acquired infections, ventilator-acquired pneumonia, patient falls, and similar events are (hopefully) rare enough to promote discussion of control charts for rare events. A Google search will, for example, turn up the application of u charts to falls per 1,000 patient days (u being…
William A. Conway M.D.
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. The highest priority of our quality improvement work is to…
As You Sow
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. Not only is this technology unregulated and untested for its implications on public health but companies may not even be…
ASQ
(ASQ: Milwaukee, WI) -- The results of ASQ’s 25th annual Salary Survey show strong average salaries for quality professionals in 2011 and fewer lay-offs as companies continue to see the value of quality and its positive impact on an organization.
The survey results also show that experience…
Bill Kalmar
The 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winners were announced last week, and for the first time, three recipients are in the health care category.
The recipients of the 2011 Baldrige Award are:
• Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis (nonprofit)
• Henry Ford Health System, Detroit (…
Stanford News Service
A readily portable miniature microscope weighing less than 2 grams and tiny enough to balance on your fingertip has been developed by Stanford University researchers. The scope is designed to see fluorescent markers, such as dyes, commonly used by medical and biological researchers studying the…
The Advisory Board Co.
In our current health care environment, hospitals face increasing urgency to strengthen relationships with physicians. Among the concerns are an aging population driving increased demand for health care (as well as a growing Medicare population), reimbursement reductions and changes, and…
The Ohio State University
Drugs produced in offshore manufacturing plants—even those run by U.S. manufacturers—pose a greater quality risk than those prepared in the mainland United States, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that drugs produced at plants located in Puerto Rico that are owned and operated by U.S…
When the Japanese word kaizen entered the language of quality improvement via Masaaki Imai’s seminal book, Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success, (McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 1986), the author defined kaizen as “ongoing improvement involving everyone.” In a 2011 video posted on YouTube, Imai…
Mark R. Hamel
First, the introduction. This post was earnestly written by my friend, Jeff Fuchs. He’s the director of the Maryland World Class Consortia, a lean nonprofit assistance organization in the mid-Atlantic. He’s also president of Neovista Consulting, which works with large and small organizations on…
Davis Balestracci
Finally, the medical industry is putting aside its “We’re medicine; we’re different” mindset and taking a more practical look at quality improvement. Bravo! Although an element of physician culture remains convinced that improvement is all about outcomes and double-blind clinical trials, the…
American College of Surgeons
The American College of Surgeons (ACS) has set a goal to enlist at least 1,000 hospitals into its respected National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP). The commitment is part of the ACS Inspiring Quality initiative, an effort to raise awareness of proven models of quality…
William A. Levinson
Dr. Gary Brandeland’s article, “The Day Joy Died,” which appeared in the Oct. 20, 2006, edition of Modern Medicine, underscores the primitive nature of quality thinking—and more specifically, safety thinking—in hospitals. Although I’m not going to give formal engineering advice about medical…
Bill Kalmar
Sseems the Diet Police are once again running rampant in our nation. It has been said that close to 30 percent of Michigan residents are overweight, and thus there is a movement afoot to curtail our eating habits, not only in that state but also nationally. Believe it or not, there is some…
Davis Balestracci
After reading Joe De Feo’s July 8, 2011, Quality Digest Daily article, “A Positive Prognosis: Transforming Health Care in America,” I took another look at the wonderful book, Escape Fire (Jossey-Bass, 2003), a compendium of Dr. Donald Berwick’s inspiring plenary speeches at the Institute for…
Joseph A. DeFeo
In the U.S. health care system, quality and safety have developed into strategically important issues. Progress is being made at the local level, even if it is slow and doesn’t get much of the public’s attention. Health care improvement has certainly come a long way since the early 1990s, when an…
Dennis Payton
With the explosive growth in imported goods to the United States, what is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doing toward maintaining a level of service inspection that ensures the best protection of the public health? One option is to partner with the countries exporting the supplies. Perhaps…
Don Sayre
There is a new international standard published June 9, 2011, that might just warrant your attention. This standard’s purpose is help organizations follow a systematic approach to improving energy performance, including energy efficiency, energy use, and consumption. It applies to variables that…
Mayo Clinic
“We can do better” was the underlying takeaway message from the 15th annual Mayo Clinic Quality Conference. This year’s theme was “Creating and Paying for Value in Health Care.”
The conference, held May 3–4, 2011, in Rochester, Minnesota, drew about 1,000 people to hear national leaders in…
Mike Richman
Last month I wrote an article entitled “Being Comfortable in a World of Never-Ending Change.” Editor in Chief Dirk Dusharme and I also covered this story on the April 29th edition of Quality Digest Live (QDL). QDL, by the way, is our live video show wrap-up of the week’s top industry news and…
