Given the complexities of healthcare, do basic statistics used to rank hospitals really work well? A study co-authored by MIT economists indicates that some fundamental metrics do, in fact, provide real insight about hospital quality.

As usual with Quality Digest’s diverse audience, this year’s top stories covered a wide range of topics applicable to quality professionals. From hardware to software, from standards to risk management, from China trade to FDA regulations.

In the past two months we have looked at how three-sigma limits work with skewed data.

One of the key ideas in lean manufacturing is that defects should be detected as early as possible.

In 1500, China’s economy was the strongest in the world. But by the 19th century, the United States, Western Europe, and Japan had leapfrogged over China by churning out goods and services in vast quantities while the former superpower stalled.

According to a recent LNS Research survey, 37 percent of quality leaders cite an inability to measure quality metrics as their No.

If you think it’s hard to tell how you’re doing at your job, imagine being a hockey goalie. Let’s say you block every shot in a game. Was that performance due to your superior skills? Or maybe just to a lack of skill in your opponents?

In a general sense, capability is the ability to do something. Within manufacturing, capability is given a much more specific definition. It is an expression of the accuracy of a process or equipment, in proportion to the required accuracy.

Whatever the process or type of data collected, all data display variation. This is also true in software development.

Soon after the Great Recession, the U.S. stock markets plunged—and rebounded within 36 minutes.