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,...
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...
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...
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...
Joseph A. De Feo, Alexander Janssen, Brad Wood Ph.D
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...
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...
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...
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....
Claire McKenna
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Jennifer Wolfe-Pearce
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...
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...
Washington University
Melanoma is one of the less common types of skin cancer, but it accounts for the majority of skin cancer deaths (about 75%). The five-year survival rate for early-stage melanoma is high (98%), but...
The QA Pharm
One of the regulatory responsibilities of the quality control department is the release decision for drug batches into the market. When I was first given that responsibility early in my quality...
National Association for Healthcare Quality
The Toyota Production System and U.S. health care improvement share a long history. What lessons can health care leaders learn from Toyota’s recent production troubles? A few experts recently...
