Insights Tagged as Healthcare

Improvement Insights Blog

Posts tagged "Healthcare"

NAHQ NEXT 2020 HQ Showcase – Jay Arthur

If you’re a registered NAHQ Next 2020 attendee, you can view Jay Arthur’s showcase until October 31, 2020.

1. Click on the link below.

https://www.webcastregister.live/nahq2020/welcome

 

2. Click on the NAHQ Next top banner to log in. It will take you to the page below. Log in with your name and email address:

nahq

 

3. Once you’re logged in, visit the On-Demand Sessions and scroll to the very bottom to view Jay’s session, “Zero Harm and the Trillion Dollar Prescription.”

nahq

Posted by Jay Arthur in Agile Lean Six Sigma, Healthcare, Jay Arthur Blog, QI Macros.

Trends Are Not Always Improvements

Line charts with trend lines can be misleading. They can provide a kind of “false positive” that implies improvement where there is none. Here’s why:

“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Agile Process Innovation.”

“I go to all these trade shows and I see a lot of poster presentations but they’re using line charts and then they draw a trend line through them and then they say, “Oh, we made an improvement.” No you didn’t. If it doesn’t really fit the line very well, if your goodness-of-fit metric is less than 80%, I’m not buying it. But nobody gives me a goodness-of-fit metric called r-squared, they just show me a line graph or a bar chart and then they show a little line through it.

Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights.

Mammograms are a Type of Inspection

Breast Cancer is Rare, yet we subject women to mammograms to try to detect it. False positives are 20X higher than true positives. Deming said: “Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.”

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

“I found another interesting item in Malcolm Gladwell’s book; again, it was in the back notes. They were talking about mammograms. Breast cancer itself is really rare, it’s like less than a half of 1% of women who get a mammogram actually have cancer, so it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights.

7/24/20 AAHQ Trillion Dollar Prescription webinar

This was a webinar presented for AAHQ members, with Jay Arthur first doing an overview on the IHI’s goal, and then going into more detail and highlighting examples on how implementing Agile Lean Six Sigma can speed an organization’s improvement process and better sustain results.

Posted by Jay Arthur in Agile Lean Six Sigma, Healthcare, Webinar.

Why Are People Using Line and Bar Charts, not Control Charts?

If you look at improvement project posters at quality conferences around the country, you’ll find that almost everyone is using Excel line and bar charts. Even after decades of Six Sigma training and association membership. What’s the hold up? Here’s my take:

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

“Every year I look at lots of improvement posters and I keep wondering, “Why isn’t anyone using the tools of Quality?” Control charts, Pareto charts, histograms… Most of them are just using plain old Excel line and bar charts. Now it might be because they don’t know about the power and beauty and how easy it can be now to do Control charts, Pareto charts and fishbones.

Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Lean, Six Sigma.

Punishing the Masses for the Sins of the Few

Gut feel often leads to wasteful solutions to almost everything. Here’s why:

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

“When I was working at U.S. West in the phone company we had a little problem in Iowa. We were doing about 12,000 repair appointments a month; that’s where they would come out and fix your landline phone. (I know you don’t have those any more but we used to have landline problems.) Anyway, customers were complaining because we would tell them we would fix their phone four days from now, so on Monday we’d tell them Thursday and so on.

Posted by Jay Arthur in Data Mining, Improvement Insights.

Tools to Monitor Your Own Health

Even before COVID-19, I gave my staff digital thermometers, oximeters and blood pressure cuffs to help them monitor their health. You can too. Here’s how:

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

“I don’t know about you but when I was a kid growing up and my mom needed to take my temperature we used something called a thermometer. This is actually the original box that it was in, but that’s no longer necessary right? Now we have these kind of tools which you can just buy at your local store. Once you press it and turn it on you just scan it across your head and it’ll read your temperature.

Posted by Jay Arthur in Healthcare, Improvement Insights.

FOLB – Fear of Looking Bad

Humans, by nature, have a fear of looking bad (FOLB). And we have a fear of looking stupid (FOLS). These are slowing COVID-19 response and quality improvement. Here’s why:

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

“You’ve all probably all heard some of these acronyms that are running around like FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. Well, I wanted to introduce you to a couple more that I’d like you to consider. FOLB: Fear Of Looking Bad.

“Now when I’ve gone out to work with companies in consulting roles, some of these managers think, “I’m supposed to be in charge of fixing everything.

Posted by Jay Arthur in Healthcare, Improvement Insights, Lean, Manufacturing, Six Sigma.

Stop Projecting the Past Into the Future

If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t keep doing things the same old way. The status quo isn’t working for us anymore. We have to stop projecting the past (the way we’ve always done it) into the future. The future doesn’t have to be an endless rerun of the past.

“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Agile Process Innovation” and QI Macros [software]. Here’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Stop projecting your past into your future.

“Way too many people do this, right? We start thinking, “Well, we’ve always done it that way so we have to always do it that way.”

Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights.

Cholera and COVID-19 Hot Spot Detection and Quarantine

There are COVID-19 hot spots and cold spots. How do we keep the cold spots open and detect and quarantine warming spots? Maybe statistical process control can help.

  denver covid case rate

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

“Back in the mid 1800s there was a cholera outbreak in London, and John Snow (not of Game of Thrones, but Dr. John Snow) said, “I think there’s a pattern here.” He went out and figured out that everybody who had cholera was getting water from the Broad Street pump. Back then, there was no indoor running water so you had to take your pail, go out to the pump and get your water for your home or your business or your restaurant.

Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Six Sigma.