The accreditation systems of the United States, Canada, and Australia have been restructured to reflect the adoption by health services of the industrial model of continuous quality improvement. The industrial model of quality makes assumptions about management structures and the relation of process to outcome which are not readily transferable to the assessment of quality in health care. The a...

Combining efficiency with reliability within CP systems is one of the main concerns of CP developers. This paper presents a simple and efficient way to connect Choco and Ibex, two CP solvers respectively spe-cialised on finite and continuous domains. This enables to take advantage of the most recent advances of the continuous community within Choco while saving development and maintenance resou...

Background: Hospital accreditation is an external evaluation of a hospital’s structures, processes and results by an independent professional accreditation body using pre-established optimum standards. Accreditation has an important role in improving the quality, safety, effectiveness and efficiency of hospital services. This study aimed to examine the effects of hospital accreditation program ...

Getting busy practitioners to learn about and to take up quality improvement is diYcult. Demanding work schedules and external work stressors are among the barriers. Not surprisingly, there are only a few examples of implementation of continuous quality improvement in primary care. In settings other than health care it seems that approaches to improvement—such as continuous quality improvement—...

Continuous improvement is a reflection of the culture of a company whose goal is to respond to the needs of its customers. It may not only result in better customer satisfaction, but in increased productivity, profitability and employee satisfaction. This paper presents a study of how a continuous improvementbased quality management system might be implemented in the modular housing industry. F...

In the rapid technological innovation and changes era, the key to the survival company is the continuous improvement of its process. In this paper, we introduce Software Process Improvement (SPI) and Quality Function Deployment (QFD); and for combining also the staged model and the continuous model in CMMI, the Software Process Improvement framework with CMMI has two parts: 1) Software Process ...

BACKGROUND Standardized reporting systems for diagnostic and screening tests facilitate quality improvement programs and clear communication among health care providers. Although colonoscopy is commonly used for screening, diagnosis, and therapy, no standardized reporting system for this procedure currently exists. The Quality Assurance Task Group of the National Colorectal Cancer Roundtable de...

BACKGROUND Intraoperative awareness in patients undergoing general anesthesia is an infrequent but well-described adverse outcome. The reported incidence of this phenomenon is between 0.1% and 0.9%. METHODS With institutional review board approval, the authors reviewed continuous quality improvement data from 3 yr (2002-2004) at the locations where the physician group provided anesthesia. Boa...