TQM Practices in Public Sector

This study aims to discuss the evolution, principles, and stages of total quality management (TQM) in public health care organizations. It also makes a comparison that how case organizations think about quality and TQM along with its applicability within public sector. The study can be categorized as qualitative research. The data is collected from semi structural interviews of the informants and the concerning documents, which consist of strategy, policy papers and audit reports of the case organizations. Altogether there are two case organizations. Furthermore, data is analyzed with the help of content analysis. Most vital issues in TQM practices are its comprehensiveness, and its application in such a way which is appropriate for the organization, with a logical way of operation and the participation of management and personnel. Training, guidance, teamwork, involvement and learning are imperative for achieving a continuous improvement culture and are vital elements when adopting TQM. Managers should learn from the experience of TQM implementers by studying expected challenges and pitfalls. They should also pay more attention to the crucial role of all stakeholders in the TQM implementation. The study could be quite valuable from a strategic perspective in providing guidelines to build up a proper plan for TQM practices more promptly. The paper also manages to shed light on TQM practices of public service organizations by comparing their current approaches to quality.

Operations Project and Management in Trauma Centers

Topic of discussions over the last decades, the literature related to the care of patients suffering from poly-trauma, under the assistance point of view, is sufficiently consolidated concerning to the adoption of best practices, what, usually are conducted and disseminated by accrediting organizations. However, expanding the search frontier beyond the assistance dimension, it's noticed the divergences between the recent researches or theoretical shortcomings regarding to the design and management of these operations. In face of this finding, noticed from a literature review in the most important bases of operations management and health, it's adopted a conceptual model which covers relevant elements of the project of an operation, such as: strategy, capacity, human resources, incentive systems, organizational structure and decision making; in order to systematize the current stage of the field, highlighting the differences between recent studies and proposing a set of practices and premises, which are necessary for the operationalization of the proposed model.

Surgery Operations Modeling and Scheduling in Healthcare Systems

Surgery operations scheduling is a complex task due to operation duration uncertainties and resource sharing and availabilities in healthcare processes. In current health care systems it is important to minimize staff idle time and maintain a high utilization rate for surgery facilities. In the present study a nonlinear mathematical model for surgery scheduling is described, and an approximated linear model is deduced based on a set of assumptions. The linear model is solved using heuristic approach. The objective is to maximize the utilization of operating rooms and the surgery staff. Computational results show that our model improved the surgery schedule and the resources utilization. Our model also showed the potential of adding cases to the schedule due to minimizing the completion time of the schedule.

Wireless Heartrate Monitoring Along Prioritized Alert Notification Using Mobile Techniques

The increasing number of problems that need to be addressed in the hospital sector calls for innovation in this field. It brings us the need to find cost-effective and memory-efficient solutions to handle the vast data and sector it into essential information to operate on the patient. There used to be many systems to manage clinical records which are fixed at a place. It is quite complicated to get the information and make this data available at a patient's bedside. This leads to a considerable amount of wasted time in moving to those storage PCs and also the cost afforded is comparatively high. A computer system that controls and accomplishes all the data in the hospital database to provide effective healthcare is called hospital information system (HIS). The introduction of HIS made billing and inventor easier for the staff. This paper discusses diverse methods that improve the cost, demands of HIS, and provide techniques to function efficiently using wireless networks. Also, the paper gives a comparative study on different aspects such as cost, quality of service, transportation, and security. A new system is proposed by combining the wireless healthcare system along prioritized alert notification.

Applied Pervasive Patient Timeline in Intensive Care Units

This study has the objective of introducing an innovative way of presenting and representing information concerning patients in Intensive Care Units. Therefore, the Pervasive Patient Timeline, which has the purpose of offering support to intensivists' decision-making process, by providing access to a real-time environment, was developed. The solution is patient-centred as it can be accessed from anywhere, at any time and it contains patients' clinical data since they are admitted to the ICU until their discharge. The environment holds data concerning vital signs, laboratory results, therapeutics, and data mining predictions, which can be analysed to have a better understanding of patients' present and future condition. Due to the nature of the critical care environment, the pervasive aspect is crucial because it allows intensivists make decisions when they have to be made. The Pervasive Patient Timeline is focused on improving the quality of care by helping the intensivists perform better in their daily activity.

A Simulation Model for Resource Balancing in Healthcare Systems

This study aims to analyze resource effectiveness through developed model. Changing different number of resources and testing their response, appropriate number of resources can be identified as a basis of resource balancing through what-if analysis. The simulation model for emergency department is developed by Arena package program. The patient waiting times are reduced by the tested scenarios. Health care system is very expensive sector and related costs are very high. To raise service quality, number of doctor and nurse are increased but system target is provided by increased number of register clerk. Testing different scenarios, effective policy can be designed using developed simulation model. This chapter provides the readers to evaluate healthcare system using discrete event simulation. The developed model could be evaluated as a base for new implementations in other hospitals and clinics.

An Online Neonatal Intensive-Care Unit Monitoring System for Hospitals in Nigeria

This paper presents an online monitoring system for the storage and retrieval of physiological data from neonates admitted into the Neonatal intensive care units (NICU) of Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. In order to develop this system, the requirements of the proposed system were identified and analyzed as system and user requirements independently and the requirements were designed using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools. The system was implemented using Web 2.0 technologies such as, the hypertext markup language (HTML), the cascading styling sheets (CSS), PHP and MySQL. With the system, storage and retrieval of information by the nurses and any authorized users will be easy.

Categorize Readmitted Patients in Intensive Medicine by Means of Clustering Data Mining

With a constant increasing in the health expenses and the aggravation of the global economic situation, managing costs and resources in healthcare is nowadays an essential point in the management of hospitals. The goal of this work is to apply clustering techniques to data collected in real-time about readmitted patients in Intensive Care Units in order to know some possible features that affect readmissions in this area. By knowing the common characteristics of readmitted patients it will be possible helping to improve patient outcome, reduce costs and prevent future readmissions. In this study, it was followed the Stability and Workload Index for Transfer (SWIFT) combined with the results of clinical tests for substances like lactic acid, leucocytes, bilirubin, platelets and creatinine. Attributes like sex, age and identification if the patient came from the chirurgical block were also considered in the characterization of potential readmissions. In general, all the models presented very good results being the Davies-Bouldin index lower than 0.82, where the best index was 0.425.

Evaluation of the Length of Hospital Stay Through Artificial Neural Networks Based Systems

The mentality of savings and eliminating any kind of outgoing costs is undermining our society and our way of living. Cutting funds from Education to Health is at best delaying the inevitable “Crash” that is foreshadowed. Regarding Health, a major concern, can be described as jeopardize the health of Patients – Reduce of the Length of Hospital. As we all know, Human Health is very sensitive and prune to drastic changes in short spaces of time. Factors like age, sex, their ambient context – house conditions, daily lives – should all be important when deciding how long a specific patient should remain safe in a hospital. In no way, ought this be decided by the economic politics. Logic Programming was used for knowledge representation and reasoning, letting the modeling of the universe of discourse in terms of defective data, information and knowledge. Artificial Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms were used in order to evaluate and predict how long should a patient remain in the hospital in order to minimize the collateral damage of our government approaches, not forgetting the use of Degree of Confidence to demonstrate how feasible the assessment is.

Design of a Hospital Interactive Wayfinding System

United Nations reported the importance of wayfindng as part of providing sustainable and beneficial accessibility to the public in built environment such as a hospital. Despite this, the survey conducted in this study found that current wayfinding system in hospitals does not meet the requirements of the Malaysian demography which is multilingual and multicultural. Furthermore, the various literacy levels in this country make the design more challenging. The objective of this study is to design, develop and test a hospital interactive wayfinding system (HIWS) that is targeted towards the West Malaysian population. Using the established symbols that has been validated by other studies and from the survey feedback obtained, the HIWS was designed and developed and tested with 24 Malaysian users using the lab based user experience testing. Although the results seems promising whereby 83% of users liked the system, the qualitative feedback revealed various improvements to the system, that would be valuable to the design and development team to improve HIWS.