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ABSTRACT: Technologies that increase efficiency, enhance quality, and improve patient safety are essential for all healthcare organizations. Radio frequency identification devices (RFIDs) seem to be right for this challenge. RFIDs can be integrated into all areas of the internal patient supply chain, serving as clearinghouses of information. By providing timely information on patients, processes, and equipment, RFIDs can save time and reduce costs while simultaneously improving quality and patient safety. Healthcare leaders owe it to all constituencies to take a serious look at what RFIDs can offer.
Hospital Topics 01/2010; 88(1):26-31.
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ABSTRACT: The increased focus on health care quality is changing the face of performance measures. Traditional measures of financial performance are being complemented by indicators of satisfaction, medical error rates, infection control ,and more. This study surveyed health care executives to determine the performance indicators considered critical for organizational assessment and improvement. The findings suggest financial measures such as operating profit margin, days cash on hand, charity care, net profit margin, bad dept expense, and days in accounts receivable A/R continue to be critical for health care decision makers. These measures are complemented by non-financial indicators such as physician and employee satisfaction, hospital-acquired infection rates, surgical site infection rates, inpatient mortality, infection control outcomes, and medication error rates. The results of this study underscore the notion that health care administrators are concerned about delivering high-quality effective health care in which both customers and providers are satisfied and which is done in a strong financial environment.
Journal of health care finance 02/2008; 34(3):19-33.
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ABSTRACT: This paper sets out to analyse the use of the Six Sigma methodology to improve quality in healthcare. It looks at how Six Sigma grew out of the concept of Total Quality Management (TQM).
Six Sigma is a quality improvement methodology that has been widely adopted by companies since the early 1990s and has grown exponentially in the healthcare industry during the past five years. Some of the main tenets of Six Sigma have emerged from the principles of TQM, including the notion that the entire organization must support the quality effort; that there should be a vigorous education effort; and that a quality improvement process should emphasize root cause analysis.
In spite of its early success, TQM "crashed and burned" for several reasons including the fact that financial benefits were difficult to assign to TQM efforts, root cause was not always determined resulting in recurring errors, there was no common metric to measure the level of quality attained, and quality efforts were sometimes aimed at processes or operations that were not critical to the customer. Six Sigma filled the vacuums created by these TQM failures in several ways. Under the Six Sigma methodology, quality improvement projects are carefully defined so that they can be successfully completed within a relatively short time frame. Financials are applied to each completed project so that management knows how much the project saves the institution.
On each project, intense study is used to determine root cause analysis; and in the end, a metric known as "sigma level" can be assigned to signify the level of quality. Six Sigma has a "critical to quality" dimension that keeps the quality effort focused on improving only those things that really matter to the customer.
Leadership in Health Services 02/2006; 19(2-3):259-66.
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ABSTRACT: Six Sigma is a new management philosophy that seeks a nonexistent error rate. It is ripe for healthcare because many healthcare processes require a near-zero tolerance for mistakes. For most organizations, establishing a Six Sigma program requires significant resources and produces considerable stress. However, in healthcare, management can piggyback Six Sigma onto current total quality management (TQM) efforts so that minimal disruption occurs in the organization. Six Sigma is an extension of the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis that is required by JCAHO; it can easily be integrated into existing quality management efforts. Integrating Six Sigma into the existing TQM program facilitates process improvement through detailed data analysis. A drilled-down approach to root-cause analysis greatly enhances the existing TQM approach. Using the Six Sigma metrics, internal project comparisons facilitate resource allocation while external project comparisons allow for benchmarking. Thus, the application of Six Sigma makes TQM efforts more successful. This article presents a framework for including Six Sigma in an organization's TQM plan while providing a concrete example using medication errors. Using the process defined in this article, healthcare executives can integrate Six Sigma into all of their TQM projects.
Journal of healthcare management / American College of Healthcare Executives 48(6):377-91; discussion 392. · 0.73 Impact Factor
