Reference no: EM133587369

Assignment:

1. While exploring opportunities to improve processes of care for a group practice, you find no variability in compliance with the US Preventive Services Task Force's recommendations for colorectal cancer screening across the practice's physicians over time. Is this absence of variation optimal? Why or why not?
2. Distinguish between random and assignable variation. Discuss the relevance of each to measuring quality of care and to the design and evaluation of quality improvement initiatives.
3. Describe the three categories of care identified by Wennberg (2011), the possible opportunities for improvement that unwarranted variation might indicate in each of these categories, and the goals of health services research and quality improvement initiatives in each category.
4. Why is an expanded concept of "variation" necessary in statistical improvement? Is all variation necessarily numerical? How might this approach invalidate concepts and techniques taught in traditional basic statistics courses?
5. What are the advantages of initially plotting important data over time?
6. How might you improve the "everyday use of organizational data" process? Do you currently see it as a source of waste hampering your improvement efforts?
7. How should goals factor into improvement efforts?