Michele DeMeo
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. Chemical indicators...
Dennis F. Haley
(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...
Tony Shaw
A woman in Southern California’s Inland Empire, age 53, is suffering from an unidentified neurological disorder. It started as an odd numbness in her left arm, and now she feels an uncomfortable,...
Rashi Agarwal
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...
NIST
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program (VACSP) Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center (the Center) is a federal government organization that supports multicenter...
Georgia Institute of Technology
The cross-functional team at Piedmont Newnan was made up of employees that deal with the process daily. For this process improvement project, they focused on case carts, which are...
Knowledge at Wharton
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...
redOrbit
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...
Mark Graban
When I was in Sweden recently, we had a lot of good discussion about the lean concept of “standardized work.”
There was much agreement from different presenters at the lean laboratories...
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
On a summer weekend in 1977, my friend Tony and I made plans to go water-skiing. When he picked me up there were two people in the car that I did not know. He introduced his new girlfriend, Sue, and...
Jane Martinsons
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...
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
In the early 1970s I was a young teenager who was completely caught up in the Zeitgeist. I admired the long-haired rebels and radicals who were engaged in protesting the establishment and developing...
H. James Harrington
The world is changing so fast today that it is almost impossible to keep up with the latest trends in your own profession. If you are not spending at least two hours per day updating yourself in...
Mike Micklewright
Can you imagine producing products with a tremendous amount of variation? I’m sure many of you know this all too well. I mean, here you’re trying to produce the same products, trying to ensure...
Georgia Institute of Technology
To improve customer satisfaction, enhance the quality of services and reduce costs, Peach Regional Medical Center has worked with the Georgia Institute of Technology to adopt process improvement...
John G. Miller
Outstanding means being superior, striking, exceptional, clearly noticeable—essentially, to stand out. People are attracted to outstanding organizations. They want to buy from them, sell to them,...
WILLIAM SCHERKENBACH
I’ve spent most of the past two years living in China where I have learned much on how enterprise is managed over there. Many people have said that this century belongs to Asia. That may be, but...
Malcolm Chisholm
I have just finished rereading Walter A. Shewhart's 1939 book Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (Dover Publications, 1986). Mine is the 1986 edition, which has a foreword by W...
Bill Kalmar
Several years ago, I penned a column entitled, “Nurse, I’m Ready for My Cappuccino!” The article was an interview with Gerard van Grinsven, the new CEO and president of the Henry Ford West...
Mike Richman
Here at Quality Digest, we get a lot of mail: Some of it’s critical, some of it’s praiseworthy, some of it’s cantankerous, and some of it’s challenging. All of it is insightful. And then, every once...
