Quality assurance (San Diego, Calif.)最新文献

The continued rapid worldwide diffusion of clinical hyperbaric facilities has substantially increased interest in clinical quality assessment and service improvement. This paper examines major issues, perspectives, and methods integral to the measurement and improvement of the quality of care provided to hyperbaric patients and their relevance and applicability across different societies. Special focus is directed toward the importance of quality assessment and improvement of clinical hyperbaric care, multiple stakeholder perspectives on improved clinical quality, measurement of clinical outcomes of hyperbaric care, importance of facility accreditation, process improvement methods, and the future importance of quality management in clinical hyperbaric facilities.

Customer complaints data are usually expressed as counts for a period of time and are governed by a Poisson process. This process is stationary when the number of complaints is constant, while a change in these numbers would indicate a potential change in the product performance. In this paper we describe an approach for establishing the maximum tolerance level for the number of complaints received within a month. Tolerance level is based on a relatively stable period of time when the Poisson process is stationary. A change-point analysis is performed to the complaints data that exhibit large changes to partition the relatively stable period from the problematic period. Examples that illustrate this approach are provided.

The process of peer review for submissions to scientific journals is a well-established and widely used procedure. However, there may still be room for improvement in the procedural aspects of peer review. Advantages and disadvantages of the current system, against the introduction of systems using either no anonymity, or double anonymity, are assessed. Recommendations to improve the robustness and fairness of the peer review process are proffered for the reader's consideration.

Customer satisfaction as the key element for success in business is a major concern for any industry. In this paper we propose a customer satisfaction index using principal component analysis for a software solution company. This index was used as an input to the marketing division to identify their potential customers from their past experience. Since this is a very common problem for any industry, the same approach can be used in similar situations.

Peer Review is commonly applied during the final stage of a project and is used in the science community to determine the soundness of a conclusion and if the quality of information meets the standards of the scientific and technical community. Quality Assurance and Quality Control procedures are most effective when applied to planning, then during the process stage of a project, and during the review of a product. The gold standard for validating the quality of a study's results is comparison with a referenced data set, model, or result (Azouzi, 1999). However, costs can severely limits this approach for many applications. This article proposes an additional means for quality assessment using peer review as a quality assessment tool during the planning, process, and review of a project.

Tabled sampling schemes such as MIL-STD-105D offer limited flexibility to quality control engineers in designing sampling plans to meet specific needs. We describe a closed form solution to determine the AQL indexed single sampling plan using an artificial neural network (ANN). To determine the sample size and the acceptance number, feed-forward neural networks with sigmoid neural function are trained by a back propagation algorithm for normal, tightened, and reduced inspections. From these trained ANNs, the relevant weight and bias values are obtained. The closed form solutions to determine the sampling plans are obtained using these values. Numerical examples are provided for using these closed form solutions to determine sampling plans for normal, tightened, and reduced inspections. The proposed method does not involve table look-ups or complex calculations. Sampling plan can be determined by using this method, for any required acceptable quality level and lot size. Suggestions are provided to duplicate this idea for applying to other standard sampling table schemes.

Electronic recordkeeping is increasingly replacing handwritten records in the course of "normal business." As this trend continues, it is important that organizations develop and implement electronic recordkeeping policies and procedures. This is especially true for research and development organizations because of the potential to transform a discovery into a patent, and at times patent application contests are resolved in litigation. This paper provides a basis for the development, implementation, and subsequent assessment of a research and development recordkeeping policy. The approach described in this paper should be tailored by the organization adopting this approach to meet the needs of their organization.

The objective of this paper is to assess the impact of the new ISO 9001:2000 standard on the Quality Management Systems (QMS) of Lebanese firms that were already certified under ISO 9000:1994. To get an accurate feedback of stakeholders in a firm, three different questionnaires were developed and distributed to management, employees, and customers respectively. Empirical results indicate that ISO 9001:2000 has improved the QMS performance of Lebanese firms over that of the 1994 edition. Nevertheless, results showed that the new standard still has some weaknesses when it comes to improving suppliers' relationships and empowering employees.

All scientific disciplines rely to some degree upon existing data to design new studies, test hypotheses, and make decisions. Because existing data can take many forms, a framework for addressing the quality of these data must be general and comprehensive. By nature of this inclusiveness, quality categories for existing data are necessarily broad. Effective employment of existing data requires the development of specific acceptance criteria from broad data quality categories. A framework is presented for collecting and evaluating existing data with examples of Environmental Protection Agency projects employing a tiered data review. The systematic planning inherent in a tiered review is described and attendant data quality considerations are developed in the context of an ecological risk assessment; specifically, the process is illustrated by defining an ecologically protective concentration of a chemical in soil.

This paper assists systematic planning for research projects. It presents planning concepts in terms that have some utility for researchers. For example, measurement quality objectives are more familiar to researchers than data quality objectives because these quality criteria are more closely associated with the measurement systems being used. Because of the diverse nature of research, it is not possible to describe cookbook-style planning procedures to be used in all cases. Instead, several general concepts and techniques are presented and researchers can choose those techniques that best fit their specific projects. Examples are presented to illustrate the techniques.