Evaluating The Performance Of A Six Sigma Project

Quinte MRI, Inc. is a small international provider specializing in a variety of medical technologies including MRI. Quinte MRI’s founder, Dr. Syed Haider believes that the residents of smaller communities deserve the same level of health services as the residents of the larger urban centers. Quinte MRI is experiencing difficulty in meeting the expectations of 2 scans per hour. As a result, productivity is declining and they losing the referral of many of their colleagues. The process is creating a lot of variability and uncertainties that Quinte MRI are dealing with. Solving the issue of the “bottleneck” will make the operation more effective and manageable.

It is easy to understand the rushed appointments. Physicians regularly see close to 20 patients per day. Furthermore, the medical model focuses primarily on diagnosing and treating the illness at hand, at the expense of seeing the whole clinical picture. This often leads to frustration and decreased motivation to seek follow-up care.

Hospitals seeking to outsource their diagnostic imaging services: they demand service reliability, access to the diagnostic equipment 24 hours per day, seven days per week and reasonable cost

I also believe that patients are not being properly screened prior to arrival which is causing Quinte MRI losses in revenue and time. If a patient turns up and has to be turned away, or rescheduled for misdiagnosis there is a resulting disruption in the flow of patients which will impact the schedule and process and ultimately the pocket and reputation of the company. Further, it appears that the technologist is engaged in performing pre-screening services and this is a highly paid employee who should not be pre-screening patients. This tasked could best be left to a lower paid trained staff.

At the same time, the future of radiology represents unprecedented opportunities and challenges for radiologists. The articles clarify some of the potential aspects for future growth with regard to the utilization of IT in radiology. For example, many image producers believe that the report is the significant work product. To these individuals, the images are solely for the use of the diagnostic interpreter. From this perspective, distribution of images is unnecessary. Although radiologists, for the most part, have embraced the sharing of images, other image producers, such as cardiologists and pathologists, have not. Overcoming this perceptual hurdle is necessary to implement a comprehensive enterprise imaging strategy. The technological revolution enabling PACS has also created platforms for teleradiology. Because radiologists no longer require proximity to clinical colleagues or patients, teleradiology makes care possible in remote locations where radiologists may not be physically

Due to ineffective management systems, inefficiency is increasing, which often leads to congested emergency rooms, customer complaints, and lost revenue. Over the past seven years, Six Sigma concepts are increasingly being implemented in the healthcare industry. Despite the challenges of adopting these concepts, the healthcare industry uses them to improve services rendered quality, increase efficiency and reduce fatal human errors. Primarily because Six Sigma is based on a comprehensive approach on improving the human and transactional aspects of the process (human performance and task completion). In the case of JPS, the factors that determine quality and efficiency are the flow of information and interaction with the patients. Using the Six Sigma DMAIC process improvement approach, JPS Emergency Department should be able to streamline information flow and achieve strategic business results (p.

The first opportunity for Texas Health Care Imaging is the business slant with the development towards coordinating computerized imaging and electronic restorative records. The move in the medical services industry is consistently acknowledged to advance toward an electronic restorative record and part of that includes a total digital solution of imaging examinations. U.S. Federal government regulations are forcing the industry towards direct digital imaging solutions by 2017 to maintain current Medicare reimbursement rates. The “Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 (American, 2016) will reduce Medicare reimbursement rates by 30% for any non-direct digital radiology imaging. Texas Health Care Imaging arrangements are for the most part

Disruptions in workflow may prevent prompt referral to specialists or surgeons and ultimately delayed treatment. Patients expecting service within a reasonable time, are not willing to wait weeks, or months, to see another provider, especially if the delay is due to inefficiency in a centralized referral office.

Wait times can be decreased for MRI by increasing the provincial funding for health care systems by the government of Canada. (7) With an increase of funding, more scanners could be purchased, more technologists could be hired to run the scanners, and hospital booking systems may become more efficient. (4, 7) MRI scanners could also be operated for extended hours, allowing the number of scans each day to increase. (4)

· Provide state-of-the-art health services to patients by offering medical imaging services with rapid diagnoses.

“Did-Not-Attends” (DNAs) occur when a patient unexpectedly without notifying the radiology department fails to attend an appointment (Hallsworth et al., 2015). DNAs lead to worse care for patients by delaying in diagnosis and appropriate treatment for the non-attending patient (Gurol-Urganci et al., 2013). Also, DNAs results in wasted resources, disturbs the planned work schedules which leads to frustration for both staff and patients, and increased in the waiting time for appointments (Hasvold and Wootton, 2011). Hospitals may also engage in complex compensating behaviors, such as overbooking, which introduce problems of their own (Hallsworth et al., 2015).

Six Sigma (SS) has emerged above other QI models with its innovative use of extensive data analysis and problem-solving methods to provide consistent healthcare services. SS identifies and analyzes the root cause

A quantitative study conducted by Lifvergren, Gremyr, Hellstrom, Chakhunashvili, and Bergman (2010) analyzed the experiences and from a hospital group during a three-year period after the introduction of Six Sigma. It reports on 22 large Six Sigma improvement projects, their results and influence on other improvement activities. The study shows that 75% of the completed projects reached their goals within 18 months. The average net cost savings per completed project/year was $55,300. Overall, the results showed that Six Sigma is a useful concept when trying to improve healthcare processes. They recommend that Six Sigma should be an addition to the improvement practices used in healthcare development initiatives. It was also observed that the Six Sigma program can create much organizational pull regarding quality management and improvement efforts if teamwork is applied.

The concept of Six Sigma was developed in the early 1980’s at Motorola Corporation (Harry and Schroeder, 2000). Six Sigma can be defined as a statistical measure of the performance of a process or product (Kumi et. al., 2006). It is used as a quality control mechanism, which seeks to reduce defects or variations in a process to 3.4 per million opportunities thereby optimizing output and increasing customer satisfaction (Sambhe, 2012). Sigma is representing the standard deviation, a unit of measurement that designates the distribution or spread about the mean of a process (Six Sigma Academy, 2002). In addition, the Six Sigma uniquely driven by close understanding of customer needs, disciplined use of fact, data, and statistical analysis, and diligent attention to managing improving, and reinventing business processes (Pande, P., et. al. 2000). The Six Sigma methodology uses statistical tools to identify the factors that matter most for improving the quality of processes and generating bottom-line results. The Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure,

This phase of six sigma improvement process essentially answers one critical question; “What problem would you like to fix?” In this case the primary business objective is to predict the stresses and warp of the specimen with varying factor levels. Also the primary objective is to make use of computer simulations to predict the stress as this would lower the cost of actual production cost. The team uses design and analysis of computer experiments (DACE) to predict the stress caused by the laser welding process.