Engineering Solutions to America's Healthcare Challenges

This book vividly presents the facts and challenges that systems professionals examine every day before identifying how the system-based answer to health care reform applies. The author offers solutions that present a systems approach to changing the way healthcare professionals do business and take care of patients. These solutions, backed by case studies and proven examples/narratives, include: implementing Six Sigma in emergency rooms; 5S in accounting for medical inventory; using Theory of Constraints to form a plan for shortening the length of stay in hospitals; how informatics are used to aggregate and benchmark private, sensitive date; and design of experiments to recruit and retain the best health care talent. The book also offers an analysis and examples of The Institute of Medicine's six aims for health care: safety, effectiveness, efficiency, timeliness, family-centered focus, and equity.