Quality Improvement In Industry Research Articles

Quality and productivity improvement in a custom-made furniture industry using Kaizen

Kaizen philosophy is applied in a small-sized custom-made furniture industry for continuous improvement and to develop the products with higher quality, lower cost, and higher productivity in meeting the customer requirements.

An overview of design of experiments

An overview of the design of statistical experiments is presented, with special emphasis on response surface designs, block designs, neighbor designs. Applications are mentioned for industrial quality improvement, agricultural experiments, biometry. An outlook towards design optimality concludes the survey.

Contemporary quality management in mental health.

Contemporary approaches to quality management in mental health utilize methods derived from traditional quality assurance and industrial quality improvement. Quality assurance involves the use of measurable indicators to monitor and evaluate care. Sentinel event indicators refer to high risk events that require review each time they occur. Rate indicators refer to events that are reviewed in the context of trends and patterns. The process of choosing and developing indicators should involve identification of the indicator topic, the monitoring objectives, data collection mechanisms, and responsible staff. As well, indicator data must be evaluated, actions taken, and communication of results must occur. Positive results, like positive diagnostic findings, point to a probability of the presence of a quality related issue. Quality improvement methods have led to a further evolution of efforts to promote quality care. A major goal of quality management is to utilize data to improve clinical decisions. Reaching this important goal is difficult in mental health due to the uncertain relationship between interventions and outcomes of care. In the effort described,, interventions were initiated to improve decisions relating to clinical risk management and resource utilization. Administrative restructuring enabled real-time review procedures and retrospective data analysis focused on decisions related to clinical instability and on permissive and restrictive clinical decisions. Permissive decisions were defined as decisions to allow off-ward privileges for patients whose level of functioning scores suggested the need for greater restriction. Restrictive decisions involved extending hospitalization of low risk patients. Inappropriate permissive or restrictive decisions are undesirable from both risk management and quality-of-care perspectives.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Continuous quality improvement: an analysis of the new paradigm in healthcare.

Evaluating the quality of medical care is a documented activity extending as far back as 1910, when William Flexner, MD, examined the nation's medical schools. Standards promulgated by the federal government and by voluntary accreditation agencies have been primarily responsible for driving the development and widespread use of monitoring activities over the past 20 years. A new wind is blowing, however. Momentum is increasing to incorporate the principles of industrial quality improvement into the healthcare arena. In this study, Michelle Harvey poses the following questions: Have hospitals made the transition from traditional quality assurance to continuous quality improvement? Is an individual hospital's transition affected by such variables as bed size, region, profit or nonprofit status, and system affiliation? This analysis suggests that opportunities to facilitate transition to the new paradigm abound.

Integrating providers into quality improvement

Brigham and Women's Hospital initiated a study of the quality of care centering on self-reporting of potential medical injuries by providers. The goal of the study is to decrease the incidence of such injuries through a continuous quality methodology that integrates providers into the identification phase and incorporates all hospital employees in the development of new practices. This article provides an overview of the investigation methodology and discusses the conceptual relationships between clinical epidemiological analyses and industrial quality improvement.

Applications of Industrial Quality Improvement in Health Care

Quality in medical care traditionally has been regarded as the professionally defined optimum that brings about the greatest improvement in health. That definition has been modified somewhat to include patient preferences for different treatment alternatives and costs. The question then arises how we can improve the efficiency of the health care system while maintaining or improving the quality of care. The answer is a focus on improvement in the process of care and, as needed, monitoring of all aspects of the process, not just untoward outcomes.