All Features
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…
Bruce Hamilton
About six years ago I was meeting with a clinical team to kick off an early improvement effort at their hospital. We began with a reflection on the problems with traditional business management practices. To break the ice, I played a short clip from an I Love Lucy episode that has now become a…
Mike Chamberlain
According to the National Center for Health Care (NCHC), emergency department (ED) crowding has been a concern in U.S. hospitals for more than a decade. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report the number of visits to EDs rose 19 percent from 1995 to 2005, even as the number of…
This is one of the first questions that executives always ask me. Because it is a broad question, the answer is often challenging. I usually respond with a few examples that have been gathered in Juran Institute’s 20-year benchmarking practice database, such as Company A is this, and Company B is…
American Sentinel University
Critical care units at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, New York, were faced with a formidable task. They had applied to receive the Beacon Award for Critical Care Excellence, a distinction given only to the top intensive care units in the United States. One of the components on…
Mike Richman
Welcome to Quality Digest Daily 2.0! This new format represents a significant re-imaging of our flagship brand (the industry’s only daily newsletter), which we first launched nearly two years ago. I hope you notice that we’ve added more video content to the newsletter as well as greater editorial…
Danita Johnson Hughes Ph.D.
Read this. It won’t be a waste of time.
Time gets lost. People kill time. Time flies. It gets wasted. Time weighs heavy on our hands. We spend time. Time passes. It drags on or it hurries by. Those behind bars are said to be doing time. Sometimes, we have no time left; we’re out of time.…
In business there’s a saying: Time is money. The more time it takes for something to get done, the more money is wasted. Companies that can figure out a way to compress the time it takes for something to happen can realize significant cost savings and also get their products into the market faster…
Pierre Huot
If a manufacturer were to ask its clients how they evaluated goods or services, the three most common metrics would be goods at a fair price, on-time delivery, and quality. Ask which could be most valuable and in all likelihood the most significant response would be quality. When included in the…
Georgia Institute of Technology
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a new sampling device that could prevent thousands of people worldwide from dying of pneumonia each year.
Called PneumoniaCheck, the device created at Georgia Tech, is a solution to the problem of diagnosing pneumonia, which is a…
Claudia Jackson
Twitter is not at all what I expected. After a few months, I now use Twitter to improve my knowledge in health care quality, expand my professional network, and save time. Through Twitter, I’ve connected with an amazing variety of people, including health care providers, marketing pros, e-patients…
Barbara A. Cleary
A young man in PQ Systems' hometown survived a dramatic auto accident last summer in which police-captured video footage of his spectacular, airborne vehicle was broadcast throughout the nation. That was just the beginning of his problems, for during his hospitalization, his medical records were…
A new year always brings new hope, new plans, and new perspectives. While looking ahead is the most direct route to progress, looking back is essential to understanding the present. After all, the past creates the consequences that will shape the future.
With this in mind, the editors of…
Mike Richman
A recent article appearing in the Quality Digest Daily e-newsletter (“Why Lean? Why Now?” by Dean Bliss http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/health-care-news/why-lean-why-now.html) discusses the value of lean in a health care setting. In his editorial, Bliss writes about the manufacturing origins…
It is no secret that the health care industry is undergoing revolutionary changes. Are you responding by re-evaluating your approach to process improvement? In a world where doing more work with fewer resources is the norm rather than the exception, now is the right time to update your own work…
Mark Graban
Lean thinkers see the waste in health care when they are at the hospital gemba. I think this is true whether you are a lean person who is new to health care or if you’re a long-time hospital person who has learned lean. Experts (doctors) ranging from John Toussaint to Patricia Gabow to Don Berwick…
