Focused Quality

Focused Quality: Managing for Results is a book about using quality improvement as a means to enhance bottom line results. Written for managers in industry, services, healthcare and government, this important new book provides a focused approach on how to target critical improvement initiatives and insure their success. Prepare - Plan - Deploy - Transition are the steps in the improvement process that are covered in detail. Included are examples of how organizations have successfully accomplished each step. Practical lessons on how to and how not to implement quality and process improvement initiatives are given. Process assessment is crucial to identifying the importance of a process and defining the scope of what is involved in order to improve it. Before deciding to refine, redesign or reengineer an assessment is needed. Focused Quality: Managing for Results not only shows you how to do an assessment but also how to apply the results to improve the bottom line. Application is emphasized throughout the book with the focus on the managers role in leading the change effort. The authors have provided a set of questions that management should answer to determine if their organization is ready to effectively implement the improvement process. Realizing that even the best plans can go astray there is also a diagnostic check sheet to pinpoint the causes of and solutions for process improvement failures.

The author introduces Financially Focused Quality (FFQ) to the business world. The FFQ management strategy has been evolving over the years at Lockheed Martin and has been documented as having saved them millions of dollars. FFQ takes TQM and Full-Cycle Corrective Action (FCCA) a critical step further by including a financial viewpoint at the beginning of process improvement activity, and integrating recognition of cost in each step of the process. In the 21st century, technical expertise alone will not be enough. This book offers valuable financial concepts and insights that will greatly improve your worth to your companies. Equipped with FFQ concepts and methodologies, you will be able to observe your workplace from a financial viewpoint, enhancing your value as a decision maker and leader. The book presents the methodology for insuring a company-wide education on key financial issues. With an understanding of basic concepts, the book explains FFQ elements and their use in making and implementing business decisions. The final chapters contain case studies showing successful FFQ applications. Financially Focused Quality: TQM in the 21st Century gives you the skills necessary to implement FFQ in work environments, offering the prospect of improving the translation of quality and cost-cutting measures to the bottom line. It is an important professional reference and provides the financial education that all employees should receive to become leaders in the 21st century.

Financially Focused Project Management is a comprehensive reference covering almost every aspect of effective project management and providing breakthrough proven financial methods to ensure profitability.

The Guest Editors have collaborated on a state-of-the-art presentation of current clinical reviews on Quality in Neonatal Care. Top experts have prepared articles in the following areas: Standardizing Practices: How and why to standardize, using checklists, measuring variation; Health Informatics and Patient Safety; Using Statistical Process Control to Drive Improvement in Neonatal Care; Improving Value in Neonatal Intensive Care; Culture and Context in Quality of Care: Improving Teamwork and Resilience; Has Quality Improvement Improved Neonatal Outcomes; National Quality Measures in Perinatal Care; Perinatal and Obstetric Quality Initiatives; Family Involvement in Quality Improvement; Perinatal Quality Improvement: A Global Perspective; Delivery Room Care / Golden Hour; Respiratory Care and Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia; Reducing Incidence of Necrotizing Enterocolitis; Alarm Safety and Alarm Fatigue; and Patient Safety: Reducing Unplanned Extubations. Readers will come away with the clinical information they need improve quality in the NICU.

"The customer is the sole reason organizations exist," Craig Cochran points out throughout this concise and practical book, which outlines the fundamentals of building process controls around internal and external customers' true needs. Cochran walks readers through a self-assessing customer focus inventory and from there explains how an organization can shape its processes to meet its customers' demands. Learn how to develop customer surveys that produce useful data for refining production and administrative processes. Understand the importance of customer-satisfaction training. Motivate top management to instill a customer-focused orientation throughout the organization. -- From publisher's description.

Moves beyond traditional definitions of patient-centered care to improve the experience of a "real person" as patient How might the entire system for producing, delivering, and paying for health care be changed so that real people fare better than they currently do? This text applies "person-focused" principles to health management decision-making aimed at improving the personal experience of care within health care institutions to improve outcomes and cost savings. Written and edited by distinguished educators and researchers with decades of health care policy experience, the text examines how health care managers can initiate and direct the process of system transformation by understanding and using a greater "person-focus" in their decision-making. It encompasses the key domains of management competencies defined by the AUPHA, CAHME, and NCHL. The text brings together experts across a variety of health care management disciplines to examine how managerial decisions affect the personal experience of patient care. It is based on observations that many of the current problems facing health care managers are caused by lack of attention to what happens when real people are transformed into "patients" and treated routinely by the US health care system. Moving beyond traditional definitions of patient-centered care, the book explores how our entire system for producing, delivering, and paying for care can be changed so that the internal experience of people receiving care is a positive one. The book helps to develop specific rules for improving the experience of care through better managerial decision-making. Case studies with discussion questions facilitate creative problem solving based on sound decision-making. Also included are extensive links to online content along with an Instructor's Manual, PowerPoint slides and more. Key Features: Describes how the person-focused model leads to better outcomes Discusses the impact of management decisions on the personal experience of clinical care Addresses the personal and clinical problems created through our current system's standard health care delivery and financing Applies basic principles of management decision-making to key operational issues to improve the personal experience of care Fulfills key learning competencies defined by AUPHA, CAHME, and NCHL