The latest experimental design techniques for quality improvement "The methods taught in this book are a major contribution to statistical methods as an aid to engineers, as well as to those in industry, education, or government who are trying to understand the meaning of fi gures derived from comparisons or experiments." -- W. EDWARDS DEMING Co-written by three recipients of the Deming Medal awarded by the American Society for Quality (ASQ), Quality Improvement through Planned Experimentation, Third Edition discusses the principles and methodologies for planning and conducting experiments to improve products, processes, or systems. Fully revised with up-to-date case studies and incorporating new software, this authoritative guide fosters the sequential building of knowledge essential for implementing effective improvements. End-of-chapter exercises reinforce what you've learned, and forms for designing planned experiments help you to integrate the methods in the book into your daily work. The methods of planned experimentation provide an opportunity to better meet the needs of customers, reduce costs, and increase productivity by effecting verifiably beneficial changes. COVERAGE INCLUDES: * Improvement of quality * Principles for design and analysis of planned experiments * Experiments with one factor * Experiments with more than one factor * Reducing the size of experiments * Evaluating sources of variation * Sequential experimentation * Using a time series response variable * Designs with factors at more than two levels * Applications in health care * New product design NEW: Study-it software available for download!

The latest experimental design techniques for quality improvement "The methods taught in this book are a major contribution to statistical methods as an aid to engineers, as well as to those in industry, education, or government who are trying to understand the meaning of fi gures derived from comparisons or experiments." -- W. EDWARDS DEMING Co-written by three recipients of the Deming Medal awarded by the American Society for Quality (ASQ), Quality Improvement through Planned Experimentation, Third Edition discusses the principles and methodologies for planning and conducting experiments to improve products, processes, or systems. Fully revised with up-to-date case studies and incorporating new software, this authoritative guide fosters the sequential building of knowledge essential for implementing effective improvements. End-of-chapter exercises reinforce what you've learned, and forms for designing planned experiments help you to integrate the methods in the book into your daily work. The methods of planned experimentation provide an opportunity to better meet the needs of customers, reduce costs, and increase productivity by effecting verifiably beneficial changes. COVERAGE INCLUDES: * Improvement of quality * Principles for design and analysis of planned experiments * Experiments with one factor * Experiments with more than one factor * Reducing the size of experiments * Evaluating sources of variation * Sequential experimentation * Using a time series response variable * Designs with factors at more than two levels * Applications in health care * New product design NEW: Study-it software available for download!

This resource offers a comprehensive framework for the sequential building of knowledge -- a model for improvement -- that is key to making improvements. Step by step, you discover the tools and properties of sound experiments, the methods of planned experiments, and their application to the design of new and improved products and services.

Efforts to improve the quality of healthcare have failed to achieve a meaningful and sustainable improvement. Patients continue to experience fragmented, inconvenient, and unsafe care while providers are increasingly becoming overburdened with administrative tasks. The need for change is clear. Healthcare professionals need to take on new leadership roles in quality improvement (QI) projects to effect real change. The Quality Improvement Challenge in Healthcare equips readers with the skills and knowledge required to develop and implement successful operational improvement initiatives. Designed for healthcare providers seeking to apply QI in practice, this valuable resource delivers step-by-step guidance on improvement methodology, team dynamics, and organizational change management in the context of real-world healthcare environments. The text integrates the principles and practices of Lean Six Sigma, human-centered design, and neurosciences to present a field-tested framework. Detailed yet accessible chapters cover topics including identifying and prioritizing the problem, developing improvement ideas, defining the scope of the project, organizing the QI team, implementing and sustaining the improvement, and much more. Clearly explaining each step of the improvement process, this practical guide: Presents the material in a logical sequence, gradually introducing each step of the process with clearly defined workflow templates Features a wealth of examples demonstrating QI application, and case studies emphasizing key concepts to highlight successful and unsuccessful improvement initiatives Includes end-of-chapter exercises and review questions for assessing and reinforcing comprehension Offers practical tips and advice on communicating effectively, leading a team meeting, conducting a tollgate review, and motivating people to change Leading QI projects requires a specific set of skills not taught in medical school. The Quality Improvement Challenge in Healthcare bridges this gap for experienced and trainee healthcare providers, and serves as an important reference for residency program directors, physician educators, healthcare leaders, and health-related professional organizations.

The challenges we face in education, health care, and social welfare are multifaceted, reflecting the complex systems in which we live. Out of urgency and often the best of intentions, organizations implement new policies, technologies, and other innovations to tackle these issues, and hope for the best. However, addressing these challenges requires more than heroic individuals with silver-bullet solutions. We need teams with diverse expertise that know how to learn together and use their collective knowledge to redesign our social systems for the improved well-being of our communities. Journey to Improvement serves as a road map for teams that are ready to follow a different path to better outcomes. Drawing on their decades of on-the-ground experience, the authors walk teams through the phases of an improvement journey from launching the team to trying ideas in practice to spreading those that work. This book highlights the personal, relational, and technical aspects of taking an improvement science approach and illustrates these ideas through real-world examples from across the social sector and around the world.

Historically, natural products have great relevance for the development of new drugs. Natural molecules, in addition to directly providing new compounds with different therapeutic functions have provided scaffolds and a great diversity of structures that serve as inspiration for the design and discovery of new drugs. The great structural complexity and the significant number of natural compounds that can be obtained and their advantages also present some historical problems that need to be overcome. Issues such as difficulty in isolation, difficulty in synthesizing compounds found in nature in the laboratory, screening to evaluate the biological properties of these compounds, and structural optimization to enhance the pharmacological properties of biomolecules; are some of the main difficulties encountered in research with natural products and in the design/discovery of new medicines. Therefore, this book addresses the great scientific advances that provide practical solutions to using natural products to develop new drugs. We address topics related to the genesis of research projects that use natural products to design new drugs. We address the discovery of new species, initial processes for identification and extraction of compounds, isolation and identification of these structures, techniques, and advances in vitro and in vivo methods that support the discovery of new natural drugs, synthesis of new compounds from natural molecules, in silico optimization processes of potentially promising compounds.

The Health Care Data Guide is designed to help students and professionals build a skill set specific to using data for improvement of health care processes and systems. Even experienced data users will find valuable resources among the tools and cases that enrich The Health Care Data Guide. Practical and step-by-step, this book spotlights statistical process control (SPC) and develops a philosophy, a strategy, and a set of methods for ongoing improvement to yield better outcomes. Provost and Murray reveal how to put SPC into practice for a wide range of applications including evaluating current process performance, searching for ideas for and determining evidence of improvement, and tracking and documenting sustainability of improvement. A comprehensive overview of graphical methods in SPC includes Shewhart charts, run charts, frequency plots, Pareto analysis, and scatter diagrams. Other topics include stratification and rational sub-grouping of data and methods to help predict performance of processes. Illustrative examples and case studies encourage users to evaluate their knowledge and skills interactively and provide opportunity to develop additional skills and confidence in displaying and interpreting data. Companion Web site: www.josseybass.com/go/provost