Deck 6: Quality and Process Management

Question 1

Continuous improvement in the context of a hospital organization entails maintaining profitability, even if some quality measures have to be traded off.

Answer 1

False
Continuous improvement implies a constant focus on achieving better outcomes

Question 2

There is one best tool for identifying opportunities to improve health care quality.

Answer 2

False
In the field of operations management, there is a large portfolio of quantitative tools and techniques that can be applied in the appropriate situation to solve problems involving operational efficiencies

Question 3

Documenting the current process in a hospital helps to find opportunities for reducing steps, interactions, decisions, and length of a process.

Answer 3

True

Question 4

Data collection in a process analysis is best accomplished at a specific point in time in order to maximize measurement accuracy.

Question 5

A process flowchart depicts the flows or activity exchanges and sequencing of activities from start to finish.

Question 6

Process engineering seeks to increase the number of hand-offs in a process.

Question 7

A process entails which high level phases?

A) Inputs, outputs, and inventories
B) Inputs, transformation, and outputs
C) Measurement, validation, and correlation
D) Time tracking and cost ledgers

Question 8

Major opportunities to improve processes include which of the following?

A) Decreasing use of statistical analyses that divert resources from patient care
B) Adding steps in a process to validate data gathered at earlier steps and increase accuracy
C) Increasing variability in performance over time
D) Increasing throughput or capacity with little or no change in inputs

Question 9

Benchmarking a process includes all of the following except:

A) Disregard any sources of data external to healthcare and remove them from the benchmark
B) Collect and analyze data for comparison
C) Identify differences in performance and determine sources of those differences
D) Incorporate benchmarks into performance scorecards

Question 10

Which of the following statements about Pareto Charts is true?

A) They are based on the principle that 20% of the problems are created by 80% of the effects
B) The first few items in a Pareto chart should be ignored as they are the least problematic
C) They provide a graphic representation of the most "vital few" issues that exist in a process in a ranked order
D) The provide a frequency histogram of potential errors in a process

Question 11

Which of the following components of the cycle time in a healthcare process represents the largest amount of waste?

A) Idle time
B) Process time
C) Transition time
D) Wait time

Question 12

Which of the following are core service level categories for quality in health care?

A) Patient parking flows
B) Patient outcomes and patient logistics flow
C) Utilization of administrative staff
D) Maximizing revenues from uninsured patients

Question 13

Describe a business process.

Question 14

Describe the four major components of the process improvement methodology described in the text.

Question 15

Describe two common approaches to benchmarking.

Question 16

Describe the use of a control chart in process improvement.