Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals: Simple Steps to Fast, Affordable, and Flawless Healthcare

"The main purpose is to present simple steps to help hospitals start getting faster, better, and cheaper

in five days or less while achieving the goal of fast, affordable, and flawless healthcare. Healthcare has many opportunities for improvement and the use of Lean Six Sigma concepts can make a dramatic impact. This book provides the basic information to do that."--Doody's Review Service

Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals: Simple Steps to Fast, Affordable, Flawless Healthcare explains how to use tested Lean Six Sigma methods and tools to rapidly improve hospital operations and quality of care and reduce costs. These proven strategies follow the patient from the front door of the hospital or emergency room all the way through discharge, examining key aspects of patient flow and quality. The trail of billing and collections is also followed to discover and eliminate cash flow leaks. This practical guide emphasizes both the clinical and operational sides to reduce the "three demons of quality"--delay, defects, and deviation. Real-world case studies from major hospitals illustrate successful implementations of Lean Six Sigma.

Coverage Includes:

• Achieving a faster, better hospital in five days--emergency department, door-to-balloon time, operating room, medical imaging, lab, nursing unit, clinical staff, pharmacy, order accuracy, diagnosis, ICU
• Lean for accelerated patient flow
• Reducing medical errors with Six Sigma
• Creating a more profitable hospital in five days by reducing denied, rejected, and appealed claims
• Six Sigma for hospitals
• Excel power tools for Lean Six Sigma
• Identifying improvement projects through data mining and analysis
• Sustaining improvement using control charts
• Laser-focused process innovation
• Statistical tools for Lean Six Sigma
• Implementing Lean Six Sigma

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Jay Arthur, The KnowWare Man, works with companies that want to fire up their profits using Lean Six Sigma. He is the author of Lean Six Sigma Demystified and the QI Macros SPC software for Excel. The QI Macros is used by over 3,000 hospitals to meet the accreditation needs of the Joint Commission. Jay has worked with Tenet Healthcare, Kindred Healthcare, Centura Healthcare, and Christus Healthcare on projects to improve patient flow and to reduce clinical and operational errors. Besides consulting with healthcare companies, Jay has been researching what works and what doesn't work in healthcare for over a decade. He will backup his writing with examples and case studies from all aspects of healthcare.

The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business

In an unparalleled collaboration, two leading global thinkers in technology and foreign affairs give us their widely anticipated, transformational vision of the future: a world where everyone is connected—a world full of challenges and benefits that are ours to meet and to harness.

Eric Schmidt is one of Silicon Valley’s great leaders, having taken Google from a small startup to one of the world’s most influential companies. Jared Cohen is the director of Google Ideas and a former adviser to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. With their combined knowledge and experiences, the authors are uniquely positioned to take on some of the toughest questions about our future: Who will be more powerful in the future, the citizen or the state? Will technology make terrorism easier or harder to carry out? What is the relationship between privacy and security, and how much will we have to give up to be part of the new digital age?

In this groundbreaking book, Schmidt and Cohen combine observation and insight to outline the promise and peril awaiting us in the coming decades. At once pragmatic and inspirational, this is a forward-thinking account of where our world is headed and what this means for people, states and businesses.

With the confidence and clarity of visionaries, Schmidt and Cohen illustrate just how much we have to look forward to—and beware of—as the greatest information and technology revolution in human history continues to evolve. On individual, community and state levels, across every geographical and socioeconomic spectrum, they reveal the dramatic developments—good and bad—that will transform both our everyday lives and our understanding of self and society, as technology advances and our virtual identities become more and more fundamentally real.

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As Schmidt and Cohen’s nuanced vision of the near future unfolds, an urban professional takes his driverless car to work, attends meetings via hologram and dispenses housekeeping robots by voice; a Congolese fisherwoman uses her smart phone to monitor market demand and coordinate sales (saving on costly refrigeration and preventing overfishing); the potential arises for “virtual statehood” and “Internet asylum” to liberate political dissidents and oppressed minorities, but also for tech-savvy autocracies (and perhaps democracies) to exploit their citizens’ mobile devices for ever more ubiquitous surveillance. Along the way, we meet a cadre of international figures—including Julian Assange—who explain their own visions of our technology-saturated future.

Runaway Best Seller

Sometimes escaping can be the most dangerous thing to do. All Kate Ramirez wanted to do was leave her lying, cheating, abusive husband behind and start a new life in a tropical paradise. But that's not so easy to do when he's a well-known pro baseball player being prosecuted for your murder and you

unexpectedly become a best-selling author. Suddenly your new, quiet life in the tropics gets very complicated—and extremely dangerous.

Does Kate return to California to bask in the glory of her new found fame—and free her husband who beat her to within an inch of her life? Or, does she remain in hiding on a remote island living simply and happily and let justice take its course? That decision may not be Kate's to make when a series of events forces the issue as this story races to a surprising conclusion.

With the phrase "Best Seller" in the title, author Lee Silber knew this book had better be good. It may be his first novel, but he has written 18 other works of non-fiction and won ten awards for literary excellence, including the Theodore S. Geisel Award. Like his main character, Lee escaped life on the mainland and moved to Hawaii where he worked a number of odd jobs (including a stint as a suntan consultant) before his brothers lured him back to California to open a chain of surf shops. Since that time, Silber has had a successful run as an author, corporate trainer, and consultant—helping creative people master the business side of the arts and teaching business people how to become more creative.

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I've read and have most of Lee's non-fiction books so I was very curious as to his ability to immerse himself in a novel. I must say he did an outstanding job. Runaway Best Seller captures the reader and takes him/her on a rollercoaster ride of excitement and empathy for Kate (the protagonist) It is well written, light, humorous and yet heart rendering. It is evident Lee has a familiarity with Hawaii as he paints such vivid pictures of the lush beauty of the islands. I highly recommend this book and can't wait for Lee to gift us with another Novel. This book in my opinion mirrors its title... it is a Runaway "Best Seller."

And the Mountains Echoed

An unforgettable novel about finding a lost piece of yourself in someone else.

Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page.

I am almost embarrassed to admit I have yet to read Khaled Hosseini's first acclaimed works, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns so I couldn't pass up on the chance to read And the Mountains Echoed, the author's third novel.

This novel begins in 1952 as a father recites a bed time story to his young son and daughter during an overnight trek across the Afghanistan desert on their way to Kabul. The tale, we soon learn, tells the truth of the father's journey for desperate to provide for his new wife and growing family, the father has agreed to sell his daughter to a wealthy couple unable to bear their own in a deal brokered by their valet, his brother. The separation of the brother and sister, Abdullah and Pari, provides the catalyst for Hosseini to share several stories, within a larger arc, that explore the bonds of family and love, and the devastation of separation and loss.

Abdullah returns to their village with his father but feels the loss of his sister keenly;

"She was like the dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent in the house, silence that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell."

Joyland (Hard Case Crime)

A STUNNING  NEW NOVEL FROM ONE OF THE BEST-SELLING AUTHORS OF ALL TIME!

Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.

"I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts. That combo made Hard Case Crime the perfect venue for this book, which is one of my favorites. I also loved the paperbacks I grew up with as a kid, and for that reason, we’re going to hold off on e-publishing this one for the time being. Joyland will be coming out in paperback, and folks who want to read it will have to buy the actual book." – Stephen King