Reduce turnaround time through waste elimination.

According to the NHS Confederation (2012), “It’s not good to be a patient stuck on an ambulance trolley in a corridor, but the patients at risk are the road traffic accidents or heart attacks still waiting for the ambulance service to respond”. Ambulance Turnaround time is a measure of particular interest in the performance of Emergency Medical Systems (EMS). It determines the degree of coordination and communication with the health institutions where each patient will receive his final treatment. Its value is key in the determination of the ambulance capacity of the operations system of an EMS institution. Long turnaround times decreases the availability of ambulances for future services and furthermore, it increases ambulance response times and patient´s health risk. This work is about applying an improvement approach based on Lean Thinking for reducing ambulance turnaround time in the EMS operations of the Red Cross located in metropolitan Monterrey, Mexico. Results of the application are provided.N/

A systematic literature review of data science, data analytics and machine learning applied to healthcare engineering systems

The objective of this paper is to assess and synthesize the published literature related to the application of data analytics, big data, data mining, and machine learning to healthcare engineering systems. A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to obtain the most relevant papers related to the research study from three different platforms: EBSCOhost, ProQuest, and Scopus. The literature was assessed and synthesized, conducting analysis associated with the publications, authors, and content. From the SLR, 576 publications were identified and analyzed. The research area seems to show the characteristics of a growing field with new research areas evolving and applications being explored. In addition, the main authors and collaboration groups publishing in this research area were identified throughout a social network analysis. This could lead new and current authors to identify researchers with common interests on the field. The use of the SLR methodology does not guarantee that all relevant publications related to the research are covered and analyzed. However, the authors’ previous knowledge and the nature of the publications were used to select different platforms. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper represents the most comprehensive literature-based study on the fields of data analytics, big data, data mining, and machine learning applied to healthcare engineering systems.N/

Increasing Service Quality at a University: A Continuous Improvement Project

This paper evaluates a continuous improvement project (CIP) at a Mexican university designed to increase engineering graduate student loyalty. A plan-do-check-act problem-solving methodology was implemented, and a SERVQUAL survey was conducted on 67 master’s engineering students. Five factors were found to affect student loyalty: facility cleanliness, faculty teaching skills, evening student services, master’s degree student management roles at work and master’s degree students’ ages. After the implementation of the improvement and control actions, there was a 7.7% increase in the engineering master’s degree students’ loyalty scores. This research work took a different approach in assessing student satisfaction and student loyalty in a higher education institution (HEI) by using the SERVQUAL survey as the data collection instrument for the conduct of the CIP. However, there were several research limitations: data availability (such as student loyalty, student satisfaction and a small master’s degree student population size) and factors outside the CIP’s scope (such as the country’s economic situation, university rankings, master’s programme accreditations and COVID-19). Practical implications—The findings from this research study could be used by other HEIs to improve student loyalty and as a reference when conducting similar studies in other service organisations such as hospitals and hotels.N/

Sies Sigma para gerentes y directores

Seis Sigma para Gerentes y Directores es una obra brillante que aporta conceptos básicos sobre la estrategia y metodología que mejoró la rentabilidad de empresas como Motorola y GE. Seis Sigma tiene sus orígenes en la década de los años 80, en Motorola. Es una estrategia y una metodología basada en la aplicación de técnicas estadísticas para la solución de problemas o proyectos que trae como resultado un incremento en la rentabilidad de la organización. Sin entrar en conceptos estadísticos avanzados, este libro -que se dirige principalmente a gerentes y directores- proporcionará al lector un panorama general sobre tópicos como los orígenes de la metodología Seis Sigma, la calidad Seis Sigma, la filosofía de Seis Sigma, una metodología para el despliegue de la estrategia incluyendo los recursos requeridos y una aclaración sobre lo que el autor ha denominado "los mitos y realidades de seis sigma".Libros DigitalesFormato PD

Bibliometric Analysis Of Research Design Characteristics In Continuous Improvement Projects In Hospitals

Continuous improvement projects (CIPs), such as Kaizen events, Six Sigma projects, Lean Six Sigma projects, and quality improvement projects, have been used to improve processes and system performance in organizations. Although CIPs have a determinant role in continuous improvement initiatives, research concerning the use of CIPs in hospitals is relatively new. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify the main research topics addressed, including research methods and analysis tools used, in scholarly works on CIPs in hospitals. A systematic literature review was conducted, which identified 302 academic publications (journals, conference proceedings, and dissertations/theses). The research design characteristics were evaluated using bibliometric analysis identifying a high concentration of publications focused on describing CIP implementations, using case studies as research methods, and applying several problem-solving tools. These findings suggest that CIPs in hospitals is an emerging research field with opportunities to conduct empirical investigations, increasing the knowledge available and improving processes and systems in hospitals

Assessing The Maturity Of A Research Area: Bibliometric Review And Proposed Framework

In recent years, many disciplines have begun to adopt more systematic and standardized approaches to evaluate the impact and development of a research area with a stronger emphasis on quantitative techniques. In particular, identifying and analyzing the published literature have become important exercises for many disciplines and methods such as systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis have become more regularly used to obtain a deeper understanding of a research area. One concept that is of particular interest is the maturity, or level of development, of a research area. While this concept has been mentioned in many works, it has not yet been formalized, resulting in a lack of consensus concerning the definition of research area maturity and analysis techniques to assess maturity. Therefore, most assessments of research area maturity consider only a subset of the possible criteria with significant differences in the metrics and analyses used among different disciplines. Due to the inconsistencies in the definition and assessment of this concept, a comprehensive synthesis of this literature area is needed. This paper presents the results of a study to identify and analyze the literature, define the maturity of a research area, and synthesize the criteria for assessing maturity. The results are used to develop a generalized maturity assessment framework that establishes a comprehensive set of criteria, which can be adapted for use across a variety of research areas

X chromosome inactivation does not necessarily determine the severity of the phenotype in Rett syndrome patients

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a severe neurological disorder usually caused by mutations in the MECP2 gene. Since the MECP2 gene is located on the X chromosome, X chromosome inactivation (XCI) could play a role in the wide range of phenotypic variation of RTT patients; however, classical methylation-based protocols to evaluate XCI could not determine whether the preferentially inactivated X chromosome carried the mutant or the wild-type allele. Therefore, we developed an allele-specific methylation-based assay to evaluate methylation at the loci of several recurrent MECP2 mutations. We analyzed the XCI patterns in the blood of 174 RTT patients, but we did not find a clear correlation between XCI and the clinical presentation. We also compared XCI in blood and brain cortex samples of two patients and found differences between XCI patterns in these tissues. However, RTT mainly being a neurological disease complicates the establishment of a correlation between the XCI in blood and the clinical presentation of the patients. Furthermore, we analyzed MECP2 transcript levels and found differences from the expected levels according to XCI. Many factors other than XCI could affect the RTT phenotype, which in combination could influence the clinical presentation of RTT patients to a greater extent than slight variations in the XCI pattern