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(NIST: Gaithersberg, MD) -- U.S. Commerce Secretary John Bryson announced four organizations—three health care operations and one nonprofit business—as the recipients of the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest honor for performance excellence through innovation,…
(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- Patient safety has been tackled in journal articles and conference proceedings, but there are very few books on the topic. And none consider how methods and techniques developed in the area of engineering can handle safety and human error-related problems, until…
(Worldwide Speakers Group: Alexandria, VA) -- Former U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary and three-term governor, Michael O. Leavitt, has proposed a provocative plan to help revive the economy, drive productivity, and spur job creation: biomedical innovation.
In an article co-…
(RWJF: Houston) -- The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has announced an Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) $100,000 “app challenge”—a competition among technology developers to create easy-to-use online tools that help consumers find information on the quality of their local physicians…
(IHI: Cambridge, MA) -- The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), a major catalyst for improvements in health care quality in the United States and around the world, will host its 23rd Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care Dec. 4–7, 2011, at the Orlando World Center…
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- A new report has found that health care organizations that have won Baldrige National Quality Awards for performance excellence or been considered for a Baldrige Award site visit outperform other hospitals in nearly every metric used to determine the 100 Top…
(Jossey-Bass/Wiley: San Francisco) -- The Health Care Data Guide, by Lloyd P. Provost and Sandra K. Murray (Jossey-Bass, 2011), is designed to help students and professionals build a skill set specific to using data for improvement of health care processes and systems. Even experienced data…
(NZTE: Christchurch, New Zealand) -- A new report by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise suggests that New Zealand can provide a valuable model for health policy makers and IT professionals seeking to reduce costs and increase the quality of health care in the United States and other nations. By…
(McGraw-Hill: New York) -- The case studies throughout the book, Performance Improvement for Healthcare: Leading Change with Lean, Six Sigma, and Constraints Management (McGraw-Hill, 2011), illustrate successful performance improvement implementations that show how the combination of lean, Six…
Editor’s note: IVANS is providing a 30-minute webinar on Sept. 22, 2011, at 2 p.m. EDT, demonstrating AuditDocs. There is no cost to attend the webinar. Register here.
(IVANS: Stamford, CT) -- IVANS Inc. a national health information exchange, is offering AuditDocs to save health care providers…
(ASQ: Milwaukee) -- Lean Six Sigma could help reduce the soaring national debt but faces some key challenges in government implementations, according to a new survey by the American Society for Quality (ASQ), the leading global network of quality experts. The biggest obstacle, survey…
(ASTHO: Arlington, VA) -- The Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) has launched the first national voluntary accreditation program for public health departments. As a founding organization of PHAB, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) believes accreditation will…
(Thomson Reuters: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Health care spending is 10-percent higher for hospital employees than it is for the general employee population, according to a recent study by the health care business of Thomson Reuters.
The gap is wider when employees’ dependents are factored in.…
(IBM: Armonk, NY) -- WellPoint Inc. and IBM announced an agreement to create the first commercial applications of the IBM Watson technology. Under the agreement, WellPoint will develop and launch Watson-based solutions to help improve patient care through the delivery of up-to-date, evidence-…
(IRCA: London) -- The International Register of Certificated Auditors (IRCA) has launched a new Pharmaceutical Quality Management Systems (PQMS) Auditor certification scheme (ICH Q10), to support the assurance of global supply-chain integrity.
In a sector that has seen an increase in the…
(UBM Canon: Los Angeles) -- The Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) Online conference focuses on issues critical to medical device development professionals—direct from your desktop. Interactive sessions focus on regulation, innovation, supply chain, medical-grade material selection,…
(IHI: Cambridge, MA) -- Now that the harm, cost, and prevalence of medical errors and defects in health care are getting the attention they deserve, improving patient safety and reliability has become a top priority in health care. And with the recent changes in reimbursement, maintaining a…
(ASQ: Milwaukee) -- The American Society for Quality (ASQ) invites you to help demonstrate the impact quality can have on
health care. Share your best practices, successes, and proven techniques
with an audience representing diverse backgrounds, countries, and
industries at the Quality…
(Pinpoint Laser Systems: Peabody, MA) -- Pinpoint Laser Systems has introduced the Proline Alignment Kit, a visual laser system for checking and measuring straightness, flatness, squareness, parallelism, leveling, and many other tasks. This kit combines the features of a transit, an infinitely…
(Visual Workplace: Byron Center, MI) -- Visual Workplace Inc. has made available a new training DVD, Lean Healthcare. Using fun, engaging examples in actual health care environments, this 40-minute training video highlights the eight wastes found in most health care processes and systems, and…
(Productivity Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- Already proven to increase efficiencies in the manufacturing sector, standard work has become a key element in reducing process waste, ensuring patient safety, and improving health care services. As part of the Taylor and Francis Lean Tools for…
(TeleTracking Technologies: Pittsburgh) -- Renowned quality expert A. Blanton Godfrey, Ph.D., board chairman of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and one of the creators of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, will be the featured speaker when TeleTracking Technologies…
(Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Princeton, NJ) -- The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has launched the nation’s most comprehensive online directory for patients to find reliable information on the quality of health care provided by physicians and hospitals in their communities. From Maine to…
(Geomagic: Leuven, Belgium) -- Geomagic and Nikon Metrology recently announced a cooperative agreement that enables Nikon Metrology to fully integrate and offer its entire range of handheld 3-D laser scanners with Geomagic Studio, Geomagic Qualify, and Geomagic Wrap software.
This partnership…
Twitter allows millions of social media fans to comment in 140 characters or less on just about anything: an actor’s outlandish behavior, an earthquake’s tragic toll or the great taste of a grilled cheese sandwich.
But by sifting through this busy flood of banter, is it possible to also track…