Provides a link between accreditation standards of the Joint Commission on Accreditation for Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and quality tools needed to meet these standards. Demonstrates the use of control charts in accordance with JCAHO standards, and provides a how-to reference guide for control charts, with easy to understand instructions, examples, and extensive use of graphics. Each chapter's instructions are followed by examples for practice and training.

Do you feel you are drowning in a sea of data and wondering how you can learn from all of this information? While measuring quality efforts in healthcare is essential to the overall performance of any healthcare organization, it is also very complex, leaving many feeling overwhelmed and with a lot of unanswered questions: What are SPC methods and can they really help to improve healthcare? How can control charts be used to monitor key processes and outcomes? How can physicians use control charts to improve their clinical practice? In his latest book, Dr. Raymond Carey answers these questions and more as he helps to explain the need for, and the use of, SPC in healthcare. In Improving Healthcare with Control Charts: Basic and Advanced SPC Methods and Case Studies, Carey expands on his previous best-selling book, Measuring Quality Improvement in Healthcare, by providing more in-depth information on problems commonly experienced in constructing and analyzing control charts. He outlines specific SPC concepts, theories, and methods that will help improve measurement and therefore improve overall performance. Carey also presents many new case studies applying advanced methods and theory to real life healthcare situations.

Designed for the quality professional with a basic understanding of traditional SPC, this book presents solutions for the problems encountered when trying to apply traditional control charting techniques in a complex manufacturing environment. Anyone using SPC who has felt limited by its traditional methods will find this book timely and beneficial. Along with basic SPC topics such as, control chart theories, process capability studies, data collection strategies, and sampling, this book concentrates on describing tools which solve the limitations of traditional SPC techniques. Specifically designed for those who face the challenges of limited data collection opportunities, small production runs, multiple characteristics, and demanding manufacturing situations, Innovative Control Charting will become a favorite, modern SPC reference. Benefits: Discover how SPC can be effectively applied even with complex parts, numerous part dimensions, similar but different characteristics, and small lot sizes. Learn how to overcome the three main limitations of traditional SPC techniques. Explore new SPC techniques in a step-by-step analysis approach using real-life examples.

This ground-breaking book addresses the critical, growing need among health care administrators and practitioners to measure the effectiveness of quality improvement efforts. Written by respected healthcare quality professionals, Measuring Quality Improvement in Healthcare covers practical applications of the tools and techniques of statistical process control (SPC), including control charts, in healthcare settings. The authors' straightforward discussions of data collection, variation, and process improvement set the context for the use and interpretation of control charts. Their approach incorporates "the voice of the customer" as a key element driving the improvement processes and outcomes. The core of the book is a set of 12 case studies that show how to apply statistical thinking to health care process, and when and how to use different types of control charts. The practical, down-to-earth orientation of the book makes it accessible to a wide readership. "Only authors who have used statistics and control charts to solve real-world healthcare problems could have written a book so practical and timely." - Barry S. Bader, Publisher The Quality Letter for Healthcare Leaders "Many clinicians and other healthcare leaders underestimate the great contributions that better statistical thinking could make toward reducing costs and improving outcomes. This fascinating and timely book is a fine guide for getting started." - Donald M. Berwick, M.D. President and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School Contents: Planning Your CQI Journey, Preparing to Collect Data, Data Collection, Understanding Variation, Using Run and Control Charts to Analyze Process Variation, Control Chart Case Studies, Developing Improvement Strategies, Using Patient Surveys for CQI, Formulas for Calculating Control Limits

Americans want a long life and most of us will get to live into our 80's and beyond, but we have not squarely faced the challenges of living well in the last years of long lives. This book lays out a thoroughly pragmatic way to organize service delivery and financing so that Americans could count on living comfortably and meaningfully through the period of disability and illness that most will experience in the last years of life - all at a cost that families and taxpayers can sustain. MediCaring Communities offers to customize care around the priorities of elders and their families and to manage the local care system so it is reliable and efficient.Three out of four of us will need long-term care. The period of needing someone's help every day now lasts more than two years, on average. Most of us will not have saved enough to get through this part of life without financial help from family or government - indeed, we'll spend almost half of our total lifetime healthcare expenditures in this last part of life, mostly on personal care that is not covered by Medicare. We have not yet required housing to be modified for living with disabilities or secured a ready supply of home-delivered food, and we certainly have not required medical care to focus on the patient and family priorities in order to enable the last years to be meaningful and comfortable. Family caregiving will be a crisis as families become smaller, more dispersed, older, and facing inadequate retirement income for the younger generation. MediCaring Communities improve care by building care plans around the health needs and living situation of the elderly person and family, and especially from respecting their choices about priorities. The improvements in service delivery arise from integrating supportive services at home with customized medical care and installing local monitoring and management. The improvements in finance arise from harvesting savings from the current overuse of medical tests and treatments in this part of life. These come together in MediCaring Communities.Strong evidence supports each component, but the real strength is in the combination, where savings support critical community-based services, communities build the necessary environment, and elders and their families craft their course with the help of interdisciplinary teams. This book lays it out, using expansion of PACE (The Program of All-Inclusive Care of the Elderly) as the test case. The book provides a strong and complete guide to serious reform, and just in time for the aging of the Boomers which will escalate the needs dramatically during the 2030's. Now is the time to act.Advance Praise for MediCaring Communities"For decades, Joanne Lynn's has been the clearest, strongest, most soulful voice in America for modernizing the ways in which we care for frail elders. This essential book is her masterpiece. It offers a magisterial, evidence-based vision of that new care, and an entirely plausible pathway for reaching it. Facing a tsunami of aging, our nation simply cannot afford to ignore this counsel."-Donald M. Berwick, MD, President Emeritus and Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and former Administrator, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services."MediCaring Communities integrates good geriatrics and long-term services and supports, and building upon an expanded PACE program can be a tangible start. We should try this!"-Jennie Chin Hansen, Lead in Developing PACE; Past President, AARP; and Past CEO of On Lok Senior Health Services and the American Geriatrics Society.

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