Books
The Improvement Guide
A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance, Second edition
Making effective changes in how businesses are run has become a matter of survival today. The Improvement Guide offers a fundamental approach that promotes integrated activities designed to eliminate quality problems, reengineer systems to reduce costs, and create new products and services to increase demand.
This book is available through Amazon.com. Click the "Buy Now" button to purchase through Amazon. The Amazon site will open in another window.
The Data Guide
This book is designed for those who want to improve health care. Specifically, this book focuses on developing skills in using data for improvement. Our goal is to help those working in health care to make improvements more readily and with greater confidence that their changes truly are improvements. Using data for improvement is a challenge and source of frustration to many. If any of these questions sound familiar, then this book is for you:
- How many measures should I be using with most improvement projects?
- What kind of measures do I need?
- What tool do I use to display my data? How do I choose the correct chart?
- Why use a run or Shewhart chart - why don't I just look at aggregated data before and after my change?
- When do I revise limits on Shewhart control charts?
- What are 3-sigma limits? Are they different than confidence intervals?
- How do I best display key organizational data for the board and other senior leaders?
Right now skills related to using data for improvement vary widely in those working to improve health care. We find that, in general, most people are unaware of the difference between approaches to data when it is used for improvement, for accountability, or for research. This book is about using methods and tools, which some people call Statistical Process Control (SPC), to improve health care.
Quality Improvement Through Planned Experimentation
This breakthrough resource provides the methodology that engineers need to plan and conduct experiments to quantify cause and effect mechanisms in complex systems, and to test whether changes to products, processes and systems are improvements. Case studies of experiments in action, and forms and checklists for designing planned experiments facilitate the adoption of the methods into daily work of engineers, scientists and managers.
This book is available through McGraw Hill. Click the "Buy Now" button to purchase through McGraw Hill. The McGraw Hill site will open in another window.
Quality as a Business Strategy
Throughout the 1980's. Dr. W. Edwards Deming reached thousands of people with his message to transform their organizations to ones based on his concepts of quality. This transformation required a new style of management as well as new philosophies, knowledge and methods. Begun as a template to help organizations incorporate these philosophies and concepts into the ways they managed their organizations, Quality As A Business Strategy includes philosophies, concepts and specific methods for incorporating these changes.
Price $100
The Improvement Handbook - Model and Methods
People today have access to products and services offered by companies located throughout the world. This handbook provides methods to increase knowledge of customer needs, and to develop and implement changes that will better satisfy those needs. Designed as a reference book, it covers the basics, including the Model for Improvement, teamwork, an overview of the basic improvement tools, the philosophy and theory for improvement, and an extensive discussion of the goals and methods for improvement. Examples and exercises are provided for each subject.
Standard Version
Price $100
Health Care Version
Price $100