By David M. Williams, Ph.D. No one likes to talk about dying. Sudden death due to heart disease occurs 250,000 times a year in the United States. A person is just living their life and unexpectedly their heart stops. Just like that…you’re officially clinically dead. Not so fast. If this happens when you’re not […]
New Article – Leading Quality Across a System
in Education, Health Care, LeadershipThe role of Chief Quality Officer (CQO) has emerged across North America and now globally over the last several years. No universal theory or professional development program existed to establish a foundation for the body of knowledge of what a CQO should include or how to lead quality across a complex health system. Dr. Williams […]
Challenges of Improvement
in Health Care, VideosBy David M. Williams, PhD Harvardx course Practical Improvement Science in Health Care with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Don’t be fooled into thinking improvement is easy. It’s slow. It’s thoughtful and often complicated work. I don’t tell you that to dissuade you, but rather to reinforce the point that creating and sustaining meaningful change is […]
Video: Four Run Chart Rules
in Health Care, Measurement, Tools & Methods, Variation, VideosBy David M. Williams, PhD Harvardx course Practical Improvement Science in Health Care with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. So as we’re getting enough data, we have the ability to start using more sophisticated tools. And when we get 12 data points in a run chart, we can begin to use four rules to help us […]
Creating a Run Chart in Microsoft Excel
in Health Care, Measurement, Tools & Methods, Variation, VideosBy David M. Williams, PhD Harvardx course Practical Improvement Science in Health Care with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Now you can build a run chart by hand, and I actually strongly encourage that, because it’s really useful to sit down and have that relationship with putting your own data in and knowing where the changes […]
The Elements of a Run Chart
in Health Care, Measurement, Tools & Methods, Variation, VideosBy David M. Williams, PhD Harvardx course Practical Improvement Science in Health Care with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. A run chart includes several elements. There’s a y-axis, that’s the one that goes up and down on the left hand side, and this shows what you’re actually measuring. This is what your data is about. Along […]
How to Build Your Degree of Belief Over Time
in Health Care, Knowledge, PDSA, VideosBy David M. Williams, PhD Harvardx course Practical Improvement Science in Health Care with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. When we develop a change our degree of belief starts off slow, because we have limited knowledge to support our test and our predictions. As we do more testing and discover what works and what doesn’t, as […]
Tracking Data Over Time
in Health Care, Measurement, VideosBy David M. Williams, PhD Harvardx course Practical Improvement Science in Health Care with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. So we talked about data and collecting data, but how do we now convert data into something that we can visually see and enables us to build knowledge and learn. One of the simplest tools is to […]
Harnessing the Power of Data
in Health Care, Measurement, VideosBy David M. Williams, PhD Harvardx course Practical Improvement Science in Health Care with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. So very traditionally in almost every setting, whether it’s health care or education or business, people look at data all the time. But they don’t necessarily look at data in a way that’s helpful for understanding what’s […]
Scatter Plots
in Health Care, Tools & Methods, Variation, VideosBy David M. Williams, PhD Harvardx course Practical Improvement Science in Health Care with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Have you ever wondered about the relationship between two measures. For example, what happens to patient satisfaction when people have longer wait times? A scatter plot is a graphical tool used to examine the association between two […]