All Features
National Committee for Quality Assurance
(NCQA: Washington) -- “The State of Health Care Quality 2009,” an annual report, now in its 13th year, provided by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), finds that the quality of U.S. health care was virtually stagnant in 2008, a disturbing slowdown after a decade of improvements.…
Dave Maxham
A joint project of NCMS called Volumetric Accuracy for Large Machine Tools (VALMT), partnering Automated Precision, Boeing, Siemens and Mag Cincinnati, has pioneered an innovative process and established new methodology in volumetric error compensation for large machine tools. Volumetric error…
Michelle LaBrosse
A couple of years ago, I was featured on CNN pouring out the contents of my backpack. The story was about how I ran my business, virtually, from wherever I was with the trusty items carried on my back.
As you might imagine, there were all the usual suspects: my laptop, iPhone, digital camera,…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
The financials of an enterprise are a result of the integration and interaction of its processes, not of individual procedures in isolation. Using a whole-system perspective, one realizes that the output of a system is a function of its weakest link or constraint. If you're not careful, you can be…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
At the 2009 National Association for Healthcare Quality conference, I gave a speech on lean Six Sigma simplified. At the end of the session, one of the attendees asked, "If Six Sigma is so easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?" My answer: Because we’ve made it too complicated, expensive, and hard…
Jim Jubelirer
Story update 10/23/2009: The link to the prerecorded webinar mentioned at the end of the article has been corrected.
The U.S. economy runs on service. From front-line service in transactional industries such as retail, banking, hospitality and food service, to technical support for high-tech…
Joe Calloway
The Acme Widget Co. needed to increase revenue and profits, so they undertook an initiative to attract new customers: They launched a new advertising campaign and offered special deals to first-time buyers. They were initially delighted to see a significant and immediate increase in new customers…
Paul Scicchitano
There’s one class trip that stands out in my mind to this day. It wasn’t so much the thrill of missing a day in our suburban Philadelphia all-boys school—although that was definitely high on my list for wanting to visit Pennsylvania’s state capital in the first place.
No, it was really the…
Steve Arbogast
A quality management system is a framework of processes and procedures that are used to ensure that an organization can fulfill all tasks required to achieve its goals, strategies, and objectives.
The majority of businesses around the world have some sort of well-defined quality management…
Stewart Anderson
Story update 10/22/2009: We added a reference to Toyota Kata in the first paragraph.
The tools and techniques of what is commonly called “lean manufacturing” have their origin in the Toyota Production System (TPS). While the lean movement deserves much credit for popularizing these tools and…
Miriam Boudreaux
When you think about equipment that is used for measuring and test activities, you think about important equipment that is used to pass or fail product but may not necessarily see its correlation with a supply chain. However, this very equipment—whether it is calibrated in-house or off-site—does…
Ten years after the Institute of Medicine released its influential report "To Err Is Human" (www.iom.edu/en/Reports/1999/To-Err-is-Human-Building-A-Safer-Health-System.aspx), hospital care still has many safety problems, and the quality of care remains lower than it should be in many institutions…
Steven Ouellette
I'm not saying that the following apply to you... really. But, you might be a Black Belt if...
You test your co-workers for normality – and find some of them to be non-normal and a little skewed…
…and you know you can handle non-normal co-workers if you can just transform them
You recall…
Akhilesh Gulati
Isn't it the economy that's on everyone's minds? When will the economy pick up? Will we be able to survive until then or will we too become another company that used to exist? How do we ensure a stronger position when the economy turns around?
Alas, if only we had a crystal ball. Nobody does,…
Maribeth Kuzmeski
It happens to the best of us. An upset client calls to complain about a product or service, and you’re completely caught off guard. How do you react? Do you fly off the handle right along with him? Or do you respond in a calm, thoughtful way that salvages and even strengthens your relationship? A…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
The balanced scorecard is a commonly used vehicle that is to align organizational-chart work efforts to executive-determined strategies and goals. With this approach, strategic planning could be considered as step one in this overall business-management-system process.
Consider now the true…
In 2005, according to a BBC News report at the time, operating rooms all over the United Kingdom were thrown into chaos and operations canceled due to broken, missing, or dirty surgical instruments. The Royal College of Surgeons called for a national audit of decontamination units, following a…
Andrea Kabcenell
What if hospital leaders had an easier, more streamlined way to chart an improvement path for their organizations? Imagine a list of key processes that could—if implemented reliably—lower mortality, reduce harm, lessen delays, create a better patient experience, and lower costs. This possibility…
GKS Global Services
In this case study of reverse engineering and rapid prototyping we will look at a company that developed an initial prototype of an anti-snoring device based on many years of research in the field of dentistry. The company’s main dental advisor is a pioneering dentist in the research and…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
On June 29, 1863, a 23-year-old First Lieutenant received an unexpected promotion. The freckle-faced, strawberry blonde, who graduated at the bottom of his class at West Point, was elevated directly to the rank of brigadier general in the Union Army. He completely skipped over the traditional…
Bill Kalmar
Regular readers of my column know that I abhor surveys that don’t provide some type of incentive or discount on a future purchase for completing the survey. I realize that I may have discussed this subject ad nauseam, but have you noticed that every store, restaurant, gas station, doctor’s office…
WinWare Inc.
What does a 13-person military team need to survive in Iraq and Afghanistan for five days by themselves without any base support? What types of protective gear and critical life saving items are needed? How much? Inside the storage warehouse of the 56th Security Forces Squadron (56SFS) at Luke AFB…
Georgia Institute of Technology
Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems are widely used for applications that include inventory management, package tracking, toll collection, passport identification, and airport luggage security. More recently, these systems have found their way into medical environments to track patients…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
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n his inauguration speech, President Obama called for improving health care quality and reducing costs. In 2008, U.S. health care costs exceeded $2.4 trillion and are expected to climb to $3.1 trillion by 2012, according to the National Coalition on Health Care.
Of these costs, 25 percent…
A
n emergency response organization differs substantially from our usual public health organization for day-to-day business. However, as the spring 2009 H1N1 (also referred to as swine flu) outbreak highlighted, usual public health processes are fundamental for effectively responding to a…
