Читать книгу Improving Health Care Quality - Cecilia Fernanda Martinez - Страница 11

Electronic health records, medical imaging, cell phones/wearable devices, and all‐payer claims databases are a few of the technological advances that supply vast amounts of data to the healthcare industry. This data supports the development of new medical devices and pharmaceuticals, enables healthcare systems to contain costs and improve the delivery of services, and informs the medical decision‐making of clinicians and patients. The healthcare industry offers a diversity of opportunities for careers in clinical practice, administration, research and analytics. Increasingly, the healthcare workforce must be able to make use of data to tackle a broad range of problems.

As educators, our job is to prepare students with the skills to enter the workforce and be successful contributors in healthcare and other fields. While the four of us have a diversity of experience and backgrounds, we share a desire to teach statistics and quality improvement in a very practical way. Each of us has made use of case studies in our classrooms and found them an effective way for our students to learn practical analytic skills that are easily transferred to the workplace.

As we began to plan what this book would look like we considered several questions. One, what would we find helpful in teaching our students? Two, what would our students find helpful? Three, what would people who are trying to teach themselves about quality improvement find helpful? Those questions led us to the overarching goal of creating practical, real‐life case studies for statistics and quality improvement courses that are targeted toward current and future healthcare professionals. These courses can be part of traditional higher education programs with a healthcare focus at either the undergraduate or graduate level or part of continuing education programs for working professionals. Our goal is to offer a set of cases that would provide instruction on most of the statistical tools needed in healthcare quality improvement. A secondary goal was to make the book broad enough to be useful outside the healthcare arena.

We have made a concerted effort to make these cases user friendly for classroom and online instructors, students being assigned cases for learning or assessment, and the self‐directed learner seeking to solve practical problems in the workplace. We intentionally created cases of different lengths and levels of difficulty to meet as many needs as possible.

The use of software is now a part of nearly all statistics and quality improvement classes, but integrating technology into a course is always a tricky proposition. In addition to learning the content, there is the added burden for the students to quickly develop facility with a software tool. A frequent debate among statistics educators is the selection of the appropriate software for a particular course with concern about the need to impart software skills that will be applicable in the workplace. Given the number and diversity of available software packages, we are less concerned with specifically which software is used but rather that students at all levels use SOME software to analyze data. The basic concepts associated with any particular software are readily transferred to another. Our software of choice is JMP®. Together, we have many years of experience using JMP in our classrooms, including in online courses. The book is the outgrowth of a project initiated by JMP to fill a need for more healthcare case studies. The focus of the book is on the quality improvement tools and how they are applied to practical problems. While step‐by‐step JMP navigation is provided, the material will be useful for those preferring other software tools.

The JMP instructions provided refer to JMP version 14; however, most instructions will be appropriate for previous versions. As new versions of JMP are released, there is always excellent backward compatibility. Although the print book is provided in monocolor, the instructions will have color references that refer to items particular to the JMP user interface.

It is our hope that these cases will be engaging for students and instructors and be a valuable resource for the self‐directed learner seeking to solve practical problems.

Jane Oppenlander, Schenectady, NY

9 March 2020