AIMS To describe English specialist palliative care (SPC) services' provision for, and attitude to, heart failure patients, and to identify developments of particular interest or expertise in this area. METHOD Postal survey of all lead consultants of English SPC services, September 2004. RESULTS Of 397 services, 233 replied (response rate 59%); 222 (95%) thought SPC had a role in severe/end...

Statistical Process Control (SPC) methods can significantly increase organizational efficiency if appropriately used. The primary goal of process capability studies is to obtain critical information about processes to render them even more effective. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for proper implementation of SPC studies, including the design of the sampling procedure and interva...

As part of an effort to develop tools to help monitor and manage the Air Force's world-wide health delivery systems, the USAF Surgeon General's Office has been developing a web-based statistical surveillance information system in order to provide near real-time management and clinical information. The intent is to incorporate statistical and related scientific methods that can help identify unu...

Clinical laboratories must adhere to Good Laboratory Practices (GLP) to ensure the quality, integrity, and reliability of patient results. GLP principles include organization and personnel, a quality assurance program, facilities, equipments, reagents and materials, test systems, standard operating procedures, result reporting, and archiving of records and reports (Wikipedia,2010). This chapter...

The economic design is an appealing approach to settle the design parameters of a control chart. Unfortunately, the economic models to design control charts have been scarcely implemented by quality practitioners due to the simplifying assumptions when representing the multifaceted complexity and constraints present within manufacturing and transactional environments. Although there has been an...

In this paper, Hotelling’s 2 T chart and the DPCA(Dynamic PCA)-based 2 A T and Q charts are applied to real oil data histories obtained from condition monitoring of heavy hauler truck transmissions. The objective is to evaluate the impending failure detection capability and the false alarm rate of the control charts in a CBM (conditionbased maintenance) application. When applied to failure hist...

Control charts, as had been used traditionally for quality monitoring, were applied alternatively to monitor systems’ reliability. In other words, they can be detect changes in the failure behavior of systems. Such purpose imposed modifying traditional control charts addition developing that are more compatible with reliability monitoring. The latter developed category is known probability limi...

Inventory replenishment rules contribute significantly to the bullwhip effect and inventory instability in supply chains. Smoothing replenishment rules have been suggested as a mitigation solution for the bullwhip effect but dampening the bullwhip effect might increase inventory instability. This paper evaluates a real-time inventory replenishment system denoted as SPC that utilizes a control c...

Changes in stochastic processes often affect their description length, and reflected by their stochastic complexity measures. Monitoring the stochastic complexity of a sequence (or, equivalently, its code length) can detect process changes that may be undetectable by traditional SPC methods. The context tree is proposed here as a universal compression algorithm for measuring the stochastic comp...

In many industrial and medical applications observations are censored either due to inherent limitations or cost/time considerations. For example, with many products their lifetimes are sufficiently long that it is infeasible to test all products until failure even using accelerated testing. As a result, often a limited stress test is performed and only a proportion of the true failure times ar...