Biomedical subjects

Jiju Antony

Publications and source records attributed to Jiju Antony.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Applying Taguchi methods to health care.

PURPOSE: The aim of this article is to show how Taguchi methods can be applied to health care. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The quadratic loss function is at the heart of Taguchi methods. It is a powerful motivator for a quality strategy and can be used to adequately model the loss to society in health care. It also establishes a relationship between cost and variability. Therefore, it can be integrated with the performance and parameters of the design of medical applications. Signal-to-noise ratios give a sense of how close is the performance to the ideal. By maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio, quality-engineering activities can be aimed at identifying near-optimum levels of factors and making quality equal to zero. FINDINGS: This article shows that, when the patients' requirements are consistently met, lower losses can provide an impetus to improve patient satisfaction. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The article outlines areas in health care where Taguchi methods can easily be applied.

Decision Making, Organizational↗

PubMed2006

Comparing public and private hospital care service quality in Turkey.

PURPOSE: The aim of this article is to examine the differences in service quality between public and private hospitals in Turkey. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: This study applies the principles behind the SERVQUAL model and compares Turkey's public and private hospital care service quality. The study sample contains a total of 200 outpatients. Through the identification of 40 service quality indicators and the use of a Likert-type scale, two questionnaires containing 80-items was developed. The former measured patients' expectations prior to admission to public and private hospital service quality. The latter measured patient perceptions of provided service quality. FINDINGS: The results indicate that inpatients in the private hospitals were more satisfied with service quality than those in the public hospitals. The results also suggest that inpatients in the private hospitals were more satisfied with doctors, nurses and supportive services than their counterparts in the public hospitals. Finally, the results show that satisfaction with doctors and reasonable costs is the biggest determinants of service quality in the public hospitals. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: Consequently, SERVQUAL, as a standard instrument for measuring functional service quality, is reliable and valid in a hospital environment.

Hospitals, Proprietary↗

PubMed2005

Determining positivity of alcohol abuse by Taguchi methods.

PURPOSE: Aims to establish the critical score and screening accuracy of the CAGE Questionnaire in three treatment settings--primary health care, walk-in (triage) clinic and the emergency room. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Taguchi methods are applied to three screens of the CAGE questionnaire. FINDINGS: Analysis of the sensitivity and specificity data of three CAGE screens by leveling factor (p'), signal-to-noise ratios (S/N, SS/N) and their dependent relation resulted in critical CAGE scores of 1, 1 and 2; and high screening accuracy levels of 98.44, 97.20 and 94.92 percent, respectively. The illustrated method yielded excellent (> or = 95 percent) screening accuracy values for primary health care, emergency room and walk-in clinic patients. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: To reduce misclassification rates of alcohol abuse, screening systems should concentrate first on developing ways to standardize protocols. Further work is needed to establish high screening accuracy in other clinical settings, and particularly in those at risk of alcohol abuse in the general population.

Alcoholism↗

PubMed2004

Reassessment of the CAGE questionnaire by ROC/Taguchi methods.

OBJECTIVES: The clinical assessment efficiency of the CAGE questionnaire for alcohol abuse based on diagnostic accuracy has not been fully established to date because of the varied and inconclusive gold standards used as diagnostic criteria. CAGE has also been highlighted to miss almost half of the risk-drinkers due to the use of inadequetly set criteria for the positive recognition of alcohol abuse. This study aims to establish the diagnostic accuracy of CAGE at different treatment settings. METHODS: A hybrid of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and the Taguchi method was used, as this approach proved to evaluate the diagnostic performance and accuracy in hypothetical clinical settings. Data were used from three cross-clinical treatment settings, i.e., general medicine outpatients, medical inpatients, and psychiatric inpatients, and analyzed by means of a step-wise application of managable number of statistical indices such as the area under the ROC curve (AUC), leveling factor (p'), and signal-to-noise ratios (S/N; standardized S/N [SS/N]). RESULTS: The selected settings yielded similar AUCs but portrayed different trade-offs on the ROC curves signaling the presence of different critical CAGE scores. Analysis of the sensitivity and specificity data of i, ii, iii by p', S/N, SS/N and their dependent relation resulted in the critical CAGE scores of 1,1, and 2; and high diagnostic accuracy levels of 76.84 percent, 86 percent, and 76.84 percent, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: By setting these critical CAGE scores as the minimum detection levels of alcohol abuse, early intervention before the onset of serious alcohol-related problems is possible. This will decrease the health-care costs of the patient and, in addition, reduce the psychological and social burdens inherent to alcohol abuse both on the patient and society. Having its critical scores reliably identified and diagnostic accuracy fully determined, CAGE can now improve the detection rate of problem drinking individuals substantially.

Alcoholism↗

PubMedDate not supplied

A simple, semi-prescriptive self-assessment model for TQM.

This article presents a simple, semi-prescriptive self-assessment model for use in industry as part of a continuous improvement program such as Total Quality Management (TQM). The process by which the model was constructed started with a review of the available literature in order to research TQM success factors. Next, postal surveys were conducted by sending questionnaires to the winning organisations of the Baldrige and European Quality Awards and to a preselected group of enterprising UK organisations. From the analysis of this data, the self-assessment model was constructed to help organisations in their quest for excellence. This work confirmed the findings from the literature, that there are key factors that contribute to the successful implementation of TQM and these have different levels of importance. These key factors, in order of importance, are: effective leadership, the impact of other quality-related programs, measurement systems, organisational culture, education and training, the use of teams, efficient communications, active empowerment of the workforce, and a systems infrastructure to support the business and customer-focused processes. This analysis, in turn, enabled the design of a self-assessment model that can be applied within any business setting. Further work should include the testing and review of this model to ascertain its suitability and effectiveness within industry today.

Communication↗