 Quality and safety staff, as well as clinical and other staff (e.g., quality and/or patient safety officer at the hospital) involved in quality improvement work, should be involved in assessing the hospital’s performance on the QIs and making decisions on priorities for improvement.  Statisticians, data analysts, and programmers can help to calculate the QIs using data available from the hos...

To cite: Hignett S, Jones EL, Miller D, et al. BMJ Qual Saf Published Online First: [please include Day Month Year] doi:10.1136/bmjqs-2014003623 INTRODUCTION In this paper, we will address the important question of how quality improvement science (QIS) and human factors and ergonomics (HFE) can work together to produce safer solutions for healthcare. We suggest that there will be considerable a...

Query Integrator System (QIS) is a database mediator framework intended to address robust data integration from continuously changing heterogeneous data sources in the biosciences. Currently in the advanced prototype stage, it is being used on a production basis to integrate data from neuroscience databases developed for the SenseLab project at Yale University with external neuroscience and gen...

In this paper, we deal with the problem of finding quasi-independent sets in graphs. This problem is formally defined in three versions, which are shown to be polynomially equivalent. The one that looks most general, namely, f -QIS, consists of, given a graph and a non-decreasing function f , finding a maximum size subset Q of the vertices of the graph, such that the number of edges in the indu...

Developing quality indicators (QI) for national purposes (eg, public disclosure, paying-for-performance) highlights the need to find accessible and reliable data sources for collecting standardised data. The most accurate and reliable data source for collecting clinical and organisational information still remains the medical record. Data collection from electronic medical records (EMR) would b...

the death of the english national health service (nhs) has been pronounced many times over the years, but the time and cause of death and the murder weapon remains to be fully established. this article reviews some of these claims, and asks for clearer criteria and evidence to be presented.

BACKGROUND With the emergence of the electronic health records (EHRs) as a pervasive healthcare information technology, new opportunities and challenges for use of clinical data for quality measurements arise with respect to data quality, data availability and comparability. The objective of this study is to test whether data extracted from electronic health records (EHRs) was of comparable qua...

1.1 Figure 1 of Annex A plots data for the 301 PCTs out of the 303 listed in the Department of Health’s document for which figures are available for both axes. The y-axis is the (presumably cumulative) surplus (negative if deficit) by the end of 2004-05, expressed as a percentage of the 2004-05 turnover. The x-axis is the PCT’s target index for the period 2003/6, defined as the (per capita) rat...

INTRODUCTION A growing number of medically complex older adults reside in long-term care (LTC) and often require physical rehabilitation (PR). While PR is effective at maintaining or improving a patient's physical function, the breadth of PR interventions evaluated in LTC, which outcomes or quality indicators (QI) can be used to evaluate PR, and what tools or models can be used to determine eli...

Univariate spline discrete quasi-interpolants (abbr. dQIs) are approximation operators using B-spline expansions with coefficients which are linear combinations of discrete values of the function to be approximated. When working with nonuniform partitions, the main challenge is to find dQIs which have both good approximation orders and bounded uniform norms independent of the given partition. N...