Service and Market Research Tools
The America's Health Rankings website has an interactive map that shows the relative status by state for a number of health-related conditions and environmental factors including overall death rate, incidence of cancer and STDs, and levels of pollution.
This paper and presentation delivered at the 2013 Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference describes work done in the Ochsner Health System to reduce orthopedic joint replacement costs and improve quality for the patient. High quality care at an affordable cost is an attainable goal that is both in the best interest of the patient and the healthcare system. Driving value through minimization of clinical variation enabled OHS to meet a higher standard of patient care while ensuring the long-term financial stability of the organization.
Industrial and systems engineering students at Rutgers University completed a number of senior projects with potential high impact including a hand prosthetic that uses much less energy than current devices and a medicine dispensing machine that improves nursing workflows, inventory management, and documentation. ISE senior design projects offer innovative solutions to industrial challenges.
Sepsis continues to be a disease with high mortality, low clinical standard adherence, and high cost variation for many healthcare organizations. This Sepsis Toolkit from down under may be a useful reference for organizations looking to improve the quality of care for treating sepsis.
The authors posit that the time has come to deconstruct suffering by breaking it down into meaningful categories that reflect the experience of patients and help caregivers identify opportunities to reduce it. The authors propose a framework for major types of patient suffering so that health care providers can organize themselves to address suffering more effectively.
This article from Clinical Laboratory News describes several strategies several hospitals around the country, including Cleveland Clinic, are using to reduce over-utilization of routine lab.
This presentation at the 2013 Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference highlights the reduction in mortality rate at Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, MN as the result of learning from every death. A multidisciplinary, mixed method approach to mortality review was developed to learn as much as possible about system improvements that could save lives. This rich data source is a critical component of effective our DMAIC initiatives for mortality rate reduction.
To improve revenues, the Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital needed to determine the financial viability of particular surgical procedures. This presentation discusses how the hospital used TDABC to determine costs, utilization, and potential process improvements for cataract surgeries to determine whether it should do more or less of them. The approach can be applied to other surgical specialties to identify areas of opportunities and priorities.
The March/April-2013 issue of AAMI's peer reviewed journal Biomedical Instrumentation and Technology (BI&T) has a cover story on Systems Engineering applications in Healthcare Technology Management. "Many of the challenges in healthcare are the same challenges other industries have faced decades ago," says Pat Baird, an engineering director with Baxter Healthcare Corporation. "Healthcare needs to catch up, and I think that 'systems thinking' could help speed the process."
Case study series on pneumonia care improvement measures: Improvement strategies of top-performing hospitals
The following synthesis of performance improvement strategies is based on a case study series published on The Commonwealth Fund website. The hospitals profiled in this series were identified based on their performance on the pneumonia care improvement measures that are reported to the centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Please see the case studies for a full description of the selection methodology.
Kaiser Permanente's healthcare IT Journey
This presentation (large download) at the 2012 World of Health IT Conference describes how Kaiser Permanente is successfully leveraging IT resources to improve patient care.
Many U.S. healthcare organizations are already being exposed to Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) reviews of Medicare and Medicaid billing as well as other third-party payor audits to assure accurate and non-fraudulent billing. In response, the authors propose an analytical approach to efficiently evaluate the accuracy of billing.
In this 2010 presentation at the Dartmouth School of Engineering, SHS contributor and past president, James Benneyan, Ph.D., from the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Northeastern University discusses that challenges of measuring performance of evidenced-based medicine and provides solutions to address these challenges.
A discussion of survey results regarding communication between providers and the patient. The visit quality as perceived by the patient increases with fewer communications.
This paper details the errors in medical history records that can occur over time within the present U.S. system, and proposes a solution.