Human factors analysis (HFE) presents a formidable contribution to quality improvement (QI) in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The science behind the fundamental principles concerning the design of work systems that match the needs of the people who work in them is sound and is applied widely in other safety critical situations. Early application of HFE in NICUs has shown the usefulnes...

The three cardinals of human diets i.e., starch, protein and oil, are derived primarily from vegetable sources. With world's increasing population, there is urgent need not only to increase the output of existing crops but simultaneously improve their qualitative aspects as well. Additionally, emphasis is also required to introduce new crops in supplying diets in order to ease burden of the exi...

Quality improvement in cardiac care has made considerable progress over the past 30 years. During that period, there has been the development of multi-institutional databases to monitor outcomes following cardiothoracic surgery. These databases initially began using only volume and unadjusted operative (30-day) mortality as outcome criteria. There has been a progressive increase in their sophis...

With recent advances in Information Technology (IT), research on and the practice of information sharing are exerting significant effects on many aspects of individual members in a multi-stage process or a supply chain. This research looks at how information of Statistical Process Control (SPC) and Engineering Process Control (EPC) is shared along a supply chain on a real-time basis for product...

We often overlook the importance of several safety issues such as identification of patients, timeout procedure, hand hygiene, handoff communication, and many others. This ignorance, along with many other issues, leads to medical error being ranked as a third leading cause of death in the U.S. Consequently, quality improvement (QI) has become one of the major subjects in healthcare despite a re...

For there to be order-of-magnitude improvements in the quality of software and the productivity of software development and evolution there needs to be a much more strategic approach to software engineering. Such an approach needs to place a balanced emphasis on both software products and software development processes. A set of factors that are likely to make the most significant contributions...