CONTEXT Hospice and palliative care organizations need to measure and analyze quality of care, in response to national palliative care practice guidelines and new hospice regulatory requirements. Little is known about hospices' readiness to meet this new mandate. OBJECTIVES We analyzed data from a national survey of hospices to describe preparation and practices for quality measurement and re...

In order to support the maintenance of object-oriented software systems, the quality of their design must be evaluated using adequate quantification means. In spite of the current extensive use of metrics, if used in isolation, metrics are oftentimes too fine grained to quantify comprehensively an investigated aspect of the design. To help the software engineer detect and localize design proble...

Measurement is a key activity in DQ Management. Through DQ literature, one can discover a lot of proposals contributing somehow to the measurement of DQ issues. Looking at those proposals, it can be found out that there is a lack of unification of the nomenclature: different authors call to the same concepts in different way, or even, they do not explicitly recognize some of them. This may caus...

Define, quantify, assess and improve are the four cornerstones of a process for continuous improvement of information and data quality. We show how data quality can be measured in a reproducible and understandable way on the basis of defined business rules through the use of a data quality tool. As business rules directly reflect the requirements of the responsible specialists, they are in a po...

We calculated a sample of AHRQ Quality and Patient Safety Indicators for UVa hospitalized patients over a 3 year period using diagnoses and procedure codes from two different billing systems. Significant differences in results were observed suggesting that quality indicators calculated from hospital billing sources alone may be understated.

The traditional mean-squared-error (MSE) or peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) error measures are mainly focused on the pixel-by-pixel diierence between the original and compressed images. Such metrics are improper for subjective quality or delity assessment, since human perception is very sensitive to correlations between adjacent pixels. In this work, we explore the Haar wavelet to model the s...

Reliable measurements of air quality and emissions at large livestock buildings with inherently large spatial and temporal variations of pollutant concentrations are relatively difficult and expensive. Appropriate methodologies for such measurements are not readily apparent and techniques and strategies vary widely. Several important technical issues need to be addressed by an air pollutant emi...

Requirements engineering is known to be a key factor for the success of software projects. Inside this discipline, goal-oriented requirements engineering approaches have shown specially suitable to deal with projects where it is necessary to capture the alignment between system requirements and stakeholders’ needs, as is the case of datawarehousing projects. However, the mere alignment of data-...

The concept of perceptual image quality and its measurements are discussed. A distinction is made between appreciation-oriented and performance-oriented quality. It is argued that in both cases psychometrical scaling is a very important method with respect to the measurement of perceptual quality and the strength of its dimensions and therefore is indispensable if one wants to relate these attr...

To investigate and control quality, one must be able to measure quality-related attributes. Quality of produce encompasses sensory attributes, nutritive values, chemical constituents, mechanical properties, functional properties and defects. Instrumental measurements are often preferred to sensory evaluations in research and commercial situations because they reduce variations in judgment among...