RE: REQUEST: List of Hospitals that have undertaken Deming's Program

["Bill Woodall" <bwoodall@vt.edu>]

Hello Everyone...........

I am also very interested in healthcare quality. 

I am reading a book now that I highly recommend.  It is 

Michael L. Millenson (1999), "Demanding Medical Excellence: Doctors and
Accountability in the Information Age", The University of Chicago Press.
(see http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13363.ctl ) 

The book documents some success stories.  There is a chapter on Deming and
Shewhart.  The book is well-written, compelling and somewhat scary if you
are planning a trip to the hospital.

Millenson documents the price in lives paid due to medical errors and an
overall lack of standardization of best practices.  The performance of
hospitals and doctors is shrouded in secrecy to a very large extent.  This
can prevent process improvement.

I am supervising three Ph.D. students working on the applications of control
charts in the monitoring of rates of death and disease and the prospective
detection of clusters of disease.

I have written a review paper on this topic that is now submitted to the
Journal of Quality Technology.  It is "The Use of Control Charts in Health
Care Monitoring and Public Health Surveillance".  The focus is on the latter
topic, however.  I don't review more standard applications of control charts
in hospital applications.  I can send an electronic copy to anyone
interested.

Thanks,

Bill Woodall  

Department of Statistics
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0439
(540) 231-7792
(540) 231-3863 (Fax)
www.stat.vt.edu