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Is Health Care Ready for Six Sigma Quality?
Open accessAbstract
Serious, widespread problems exist in the quality of U.S. health care: too many patients are exposed to the risks of unnecessary services; opportunities to use effective care are missed; and preventable errors lead to injuries. Advanced practitioners of industrial quality management, like Motorola and General Electric, have committed themselves to reducing the frequency of defects in their business processes to fewer than 3.4 per million, a strategy known as Six Sigma Quality. In health care, quality problems frequently occur at rates of 20 to 50 percent, or 200,000 to 500,000 per million. In order to approach Six Sigma levels of quality, the health care sector must address the underlying causes of error and make important changes: adopting new educational models; devising strategies to increase consumer awareness; and encouraging public and private investment in quality improvement.
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Cited by
From best evidence to best practice: effective implementation of change in patients' care
Grol, R., & Grimshaw, J. (2003) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(03)14546-1 · Cited by 4,531
Nembhard, I. M., & Edmondson, A. C. (2006) · Journal of Organizational Behavior · doi:10.1002/job.413 · Cited by 2,385
Management of diabetes and hyperglycemia in hospitals.
Clement, S., Braithwaite, S. S., Magee, M. F., Ahmann, A., Smith, E. P., Schafer, R. G., Hirsch, I. B., & on behalf of the Diabetes in Hospitals Writing Committee (2004) · Diabetes Care · doi:10.2337/diacare.27.2.553 · Cited by 1,266
The quality of care for depressive and anxiety disorders in the United States
Young, A. S., Klap, R., Sherbourne, C. D., & Wells, K. B. (2001) · Archives of General Psychiatry · doi:10.1001/archpsyc.58.1.55 · Cited by 1,061
Cognitive biases associated with medical decisions: a systematic review
Saposnik, G., Redelmeier, D., Ruff, C. C., & Tobler, P. N. (2016) · BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making · doi:10.1186/s12911-016-0377-1 · Cited by 1,001
Metadata
- Authors
- Chassin, M. R.
- Venue
- The Milbank Quarterly
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1998-12
- Volume
- 76
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 565-591
- ISSN
- 0887-378X (ISSN-L)
- 1468-0009
- OpenAlex
- W2082995815
- Cited by
- 387
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 57.01
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
