I dated a piano major in college and I tried, with very limited success, to learn how to play the piano myself. She told me, “If you’re going to make a mistake, make a loud mistake.” You don’t want to play the piano nervously and hesitantly. The same is true in research. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: February 2019
Cartoon: Some good predictive analytics software…
Purchased from CartoonStock.com for this blog site only. Do not reproduce this cartoon without their permission.
Recommended: Checklist to Evaluate the Quality of Questions
A detailed and comprehensive list of things to look for when you are reviewing a new questionnaire. It is based on a document QAS-99 that was originally developed by the cancer.gov, but the original link is no longer active. Continue reading
Recommended: SMART Objectives
The acronym SMART is a nice way to define an objective in a quality improvement. It has to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. This page outlines what each of these terms means and why they are important. It also provides examples of objectives that meet the SMART criteria. Continue reading
Recommended: A Framework for Program Evaluation
This page offers a broad and comprehensive overview of how to plan and conduct a program evaluation. There are tons of resources (a mix of html pages and PDF documents) behind various hyperlinks on this page. Continue reading
Recommended: 8 Waste Types of DOWNTIME
This page reviews the commonly used acronym DOWNTIME that classifies the eight ways that waste can occur in a manufacturing process. Continue reading
Recommended: How to Use Deming’s 14 Points to Improve Quality
This blog post provides a few short paragraphs elaborating on each of W. Edward Deming’s Fourteen Points. There’s a bit of self-promotion on this page, but the overall content is still quite good. Continue reading
Recommended: Quality Improvement in Healthcare
This is a slick video that outlines the quality improvement process using clever drawings. It is only 11 minutes long but provides a very nice overview. Continue reading
Recommended: NOVA | A Hole in the Sky
This 4 minute video talks about the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica and how some early indications of this hole were dismissed as outliers. Continue reading
Recommended: Dr. Russell Waitman. Innovation: Breaking the Barriers on Medical Information
This is a short article and video of Russ Waitman. Russ is my boss at one of my three jobs, and this gives a nice introduction to the sort of work I help out with. Continue reading