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1. Why is Six Sigma considered an important tool to improve process effectivenes

ID: 2746217 • Letter: 1

Question

1.       Why is Six Sigma considered an important tool to improve process effectiveness in     healthcare?

2.       What is the meaning of the “sigma” term in Six Sigma?  What level of performance    does Six Sigma connote?

3.       What assumptions underlie Six Sigma?  Why are they important?

4.       Describe three Six Sigma metrics and explain their meaning.

5.       What are the voices of Six Sigma?  How is each important in a Six Sigma project?

6.       What is the basic Six Sigma equation?  Identify each of the factors in the equation     and explain how they related to the DMAIC cycle.

7.       Describe the “5 why’s.”  How is this tool used in Six Sigma?

8.       How does DMADV differ from DMAIC?  In what circumstances is each used?

REFERENCES:

Lighter, D. (2011). Advanced Performance Improvement in Health Care Principles and Methods. Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, LLC.

Explanation / Answer

1. The six sigma approach is relatively new to the healthcare industry. Given the widely reported backdrop of medical mistakes,it’s clear that the healthcare setting provides distinct and vital opportunities for the application of this methodology to reduce errors at the clinical process level. This process helps to reduce errors in clinical trials and also reduce cost of errors and also save sufficient amount in allocated healthcare budget

2. Sigma in Six sigma means the number of standard devations from the mean which is used to fix process control limits. This also helps to define process capability metric.

3. The assumptions which underly six sigma are

These assumptions are important because these help us to formulate the optmization problem and define the control limits on the processes which help us to monitor these processes

4. Three six sigma metrics are Non Value Added Costs, Defect rate and Number of Loopbacks.

8. The DMAIC methodology, instead of the DMADV methodology, should be used when a product or process is in existence at your company but is not meeting customer specification or is not performing adequately. DMA is common in both, IC mean Improve and control and DV means Design and Verify.. DMADV is used new process designs as new process needs verification before standardising it while DMAIC, we control the process through control and improvisation charts since they are already established processes