Improvement Insights Blog

At the IHI conference, many people told me stories of their crazy, cool improvement projects done with QI Macros. I asked them a simple question for which they had no answer. Here’s why:

“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and the QI Macros [software].

“I was at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement conference out in Orlando at the beginning of December. I was there and people were coming by and they were talking about QI Macros at the exhibit booth. You know, a number of them came up and told me a story.

“This one guy came up and said, “I’ve been using QI Macros’ histograms to plot ‘Incision to Close Time’ and comparing all the doctors in our hospital.” I said “Wow, that sounds like a crazy cool improvement project! Have you published anything about that? Have you created a poster for the for the show?” He was like, “I… I’ve never thought of that.”

“What crazy cool improvement project have you done? Where have you published it? You know, I read through all of the materials from Quality Progress to Quality Magazine and Quality Digest, and I see very, very few interesting case studies. If you want other people to get the idea that this improvement stuff is possible, you might want to publish your work.

“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”