Laboratories have historically been under supported in developing country health systems resulting in poor quality diagnosis and inadequate disease surveillance. Laboratory professionals are predominantly male with relatively limited female labor participation, with potential gender based...

Established in 1988, the Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence recognises organisations in the USA, Mexico and Canada for the successful implementation of world-class practices. The Shingo Prize emphasises the improvement of operations and processes, the adoption of proven world-class...

Purpose--The purpose of this paper is to test a method for improving decision-making at a tactical level--i.e. at the shop floor level. This is done by testing the use of the binary sorting algorithm (BSA) to improve decisions concerning quality improvement efforts among machine operators in a...

The increasing competition both in the public and private sectors gave rise to a growing interest in quality improvement and in designing and implementing Performance Measurement Systems (PMS). Academic organizations also recognized the need for implementing performance measurement systems. Some...

This paper illustrates the relationship between quality improvement, reorder point, and lead time, as affected by backorder rate, in an imperfect production process. To reduce the total system cost by optimizing the setup cost, lot size, lead time, reorder point, and process quality parameter...

This study presents two case studies, each on a current initiative of contracting for primary health services in Brazil, one for the state of Bahia, the other for the city of Rio de Janeiro. The two initiatives are not linked and their implementation has independently sprung from a search for...

Children at risk of abuse are more likely to be hospitalized and utilize health services according to international research. In a large metropolitan health region in New South Wales, Australia, there was little known of the clinical burden of child physical abuse and/or neglect (PAN), or of...

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a widely used method in several fields such as product design, manufacturing process design, and project development. House of quality (HOQ) is one of the manipulation tools for QFD and it can convert customer requirements (CRs) into the design parameters...

This paper reports the findings of a formative study that examined knowledge, readiness, and perceptions of healthcare providers in safety-net clinics about electronic medical records (EMR) and e-prescribing. It was conducted in six safety net clinics in southeast Georgia that serve a...

On May 25, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Delmarva Foundation for Medical Care, and Mathematica sponsored a one-day conference on the impact of hospitals’ publicly reported quality measures on hospitals themselves. Conference goals were to explore how hospitals achieve...