Medical Case Study with Minitab for solutions
Background: You work for a government agency and your management asked you to take a look at data from prescription drugs administered at hospitals in your geography.

She asked you to analyze the data with some common tools and build a DMAIC model for how you would work with the hospitals to improve results, since their performance is below the average. She would like a simple model for you to present to her that you will propose to representatives from the hospitals. The hospital representatives will have to be brought on board and understand the issues and their role in the study.

Use the DMAIC model from the course material to create a model of the effort to be completed by the hospitals.

Define:

1. What would you say about the DMAIC model to the hospital staff on your team?

2. Write a problem statement for the work you are considering.

3. Develop a team charter so that each of the representatives understands what is expected of them and to brainstorm improvements upon it.

4. What are the key deliverables of the define step that you expect of the team?

Measure:

1. What activities would you propose that the team work on?

2. What measures would you propose to the team to pursue?

3. What data collection would you propose?

4. What are the key steps to get to items 1-3 above?

Analyze: Prepare data to show the team about the extent of the problem:

1. A Pareto chart of the errors from the Error Type chart below

1. What would you suggest the team focus upon?

2. What would you tell the team about the data they need to collect and what will be done with it?

2. Another example of measures is the administration of Drug A, which needs to be administered every 30 minutes. The requirement for the drug is to be administered no more than 3 minutes early or 3 minutes late or between 27-33 minutes. Make a histogram of the data below (Time between administration of drug chart). What is it saying about the process?

3. Do a normalcy test. Is that a normal distribution?

Improve:

1. You don’t have a process flow or any information on how hospitals administer drugs or their improvement plans if any. What would you tell the participants about what is expected in this phase of the program?

Control:

1. What are the key steps for control?

2. Develop a sample response plan that you would use to show the team what is expected to be done.

3. What are the key deliverables for this step?

Test data in Excel format:

Error Type

Type of High Alert Medication Error

Omission

8461

Improper dose/quantity

7124

Unauthorized/wrong drug

5463

Prescribing error

2923

Wrong Time

2300