June 2000
Building a Better Doctor
Both the content and delivery of the medical education program at the University of Sydney in Australia changed in fundamental ways due to the application of quality tools. With the participation of staff and students, the Faculty of Medicine initiated...
New Skills Needed in Medical Leadership
Three leadership processes can aid improvement efforts in the health care field. These are supporting front-line efforts to reduce defects and improve outcomes, aggregating the effects of quality improvement activities, and integrating quality...
Managing Customer Value
In order to manage organizations toward value, a definition of customer value is needed. No clear framework for thinking about customer value or for constructing a definition has yet been developed, however. A useful way to conceptualize customer...
Beyond Compliance
Most quality auditors perform compliance audits to verify the implementation of written procedures. Compliance audits can be second party audits used to review the activities of suppliers, or they can be third party audits performed by independent...
Customer Satisfaction at a Software Support Call Center
Using a methodology developed by Gary Klein, a company that provides technical support to software publishing firms increased customer satisfaction rates at its call center by 43 percent in a one-month period. Klein's method seeks to determine how...
A Trio for Quality
Health care organizations can use quality approaches developed for other industries. Accreditation standards developed by the Joint Commission on Accreditations of Healthcare Organizations can be used in combination with criteria of the Malcolm...
ASQ News
ASQ will develop and manage a new Six Sigma Black Belt certification and registration and create an organizational home for Six Sigma professionals called the Six Sigma Forum. Another perceived benefit of the certification is expected to be the creation o...
Six Sigma Focuses On Improvement Rates
Entitlement can be reached below target performance level
In other words, the aim of Six Sigma as a management methodology is to reach entitlement for all 12 factorial combinations of quality at a rate of Six Sigma. Translated into a simple percentage, this would equate to a 78% annualized compounded rate of imp...
Why Do We Need International Standards?
Try plugging in your U.S. hair dryer in Europe
The new European standards are different from and in some ways incompatible with the corresponding U.S. standards. We live better today because of many good standards, and the work of developing and revising standards, though unglamorous, is profound. 6. ...
Quality Web Watch
With health care the cover theme for this month's issue of QP, we checked out several sites related to quality and improvement in that sector. Its Web site remains at the former address and is loaded with information about health care quality and improvem...
Featured advertisers
