Category: Healthcare Quality

According to New England Journal of Medicine’s Journal Watch, Americans may be wasting half of the $3.6 trillion spent annually on healthcare. Researchers identified six studies, published from 2008 to 2019, in which components of our national medical waste were analyzed, and estimated the costs associated with each. Category Amount ($ billions) Excessive prices $169…

Those of us in the process excellence and quality professions know the importance of operational definitions. Without a good operational definition, a metric is meaningless. An operational definition is a definition that includes a detailed specification of measurement. In process excellence work you will frequently discover that the opportunity your project is addressing can’t be…

This post is for the data nerds like me who want a simple way to keep track of the reported new cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus in the United States. Data are from the European CDC and are reported at midnight central European time each day. How ECDC collects and processes COVID-19 data Since the…

While most of the world is locked in, Swedish citizens are not. Sweden has decided not to participate in draconian economic shutdowns, giving us a “null hypothesis case” with which to compare our actions. This policy may seem radical by world standards, but it is exactly the policy advocated by expert epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski. According…

Since 1967, Thomas Pyzdek has offered training and certification courses using the Lean Six Sigma approach in business management. The Institute now recognizes the need for Lean training in the healthcare industry. With health care costs increasing, but patient care remaining stagnant or declining, it is evident Lean training could change the face of the healthcare industry.…

The Pyzdek Institute, a world-renowned leader in Lean Six Sigma training, now offers Lean Healthcare training. The pilot program, the Lean Healthcare Overview Course, is available now and the follow-up program, the Lean Healthcare Expert course, will be launched soon. Lean is an operational excellence methodology that focuses on the flow of value through a…

According to a recent article published on Healthcare Informatics, the University of Utah Healthcare System has been experimenting with a new way of motivating its physicians to improve patient care: let patients review the physicians as though the physicians were restaurants or bars on Yelp. Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s founder and CEO, sat on a panel…