A surgical technician prepares her back table for the next laparoscopic surgery. Instruments are removed from their containers and packages, and placed neatly on the back table.

(Academy Leadership Publishing: King of Prussia, PA) -- When news headlines trumpet story after story about fiscal mismanagement, unchecked greed, massive bankruptcies, and rampant downsizing, it’s hard to believe there’s any good news about the business world.

A woman in Southern California’s Inland Empire, age 53, is suffering from an unidentified neurological disorder.

Leaders of quality assurance programs must be able to generate interest and commitment without burdening clinical and administrative staff with an activity they neither understand nor believe in.

The U.S.

Toyota’s legendary lean processes didn’t come out of nowhere. They were forged by the fire of urgency in post-World War II Japan when resources were scarce. Toyota innovated—and continued to innovate.

With a silicone rubber “stick on” sheet containing dozens of miniature, powerful lenses, engineers at Harvard are one step closer to putting the capacity of a large laboratory into a microsized package.

When I was in Sweden recently, we had a lot of good discussion about the lean concept of “standardized work.”

With or without health care reform, health care quality professionals know that change is already a new reality for U.S. health care, transforming the industry, their own organizations, and their professional roles on what seems a daily basis.