Papers from the Symposium on QFD

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QFD Papers on Health Care

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2000 Proceedings

Introduction of QFD Method to Our Original Medical Quality Improvement (MQI) Activity in Nerima General Hospital by T. Takahara, M.D., Dept of Surgery, S. Iida, M.D., President, and M. Fujimori, Nerima General Hospital, Tokyo, Japan. Since 1996, Nerima General Hospital has been executing their own Medical Quality Improvement (MQI) Process to improve quality and function of medical care. QFD and FMEA are a part of this year's declared focus. This paper presents introduction of QFD to our MQI activities which resulted in good outcome in both external and internal customer demands.

Applying QFD in a Hospital Setting: A Study of Medical Quality by Dr. Yoji Akao and H. Fujimoto, Asahi University, Japan. The application of QFD in service industries concerns itself not only with quality as valued by the customer, but must also consider quality of the service operations themselves. Similarly, a medical facility must consider both the societal role of the hospital and the actions necessary to assure the health of the patient. This paper will demonstrate that metrics for clinical staff quality can be incorporated in the various QFD charts to clarify, evaluate, and manage medical quality.

1998 Proceedings

A Hospital-Based Service Example of QFD by Edward Chaplin, M. D., Medical Director of Continental Rehabilitation Hospital of San Diego, USA. The presentation will review a project to incorporate a customer-focus to a rehabilitation hospital service that provides multi-disciplinary evaluations of complex and/or catastrophic injuries. The service is low in volume, complex, provider-intensive and involves multiple business entities (suppliers). The presentation will include the following: (1) Classic Quality Function Deployment - Customer Deployment, capturing the Voice of the Customer, Quality Deployment, Functional Deployment, Reliability Deployment, New Process and Task Deployment. (2) An example of using reinforcing (positive) feedback to self-organize and self-regulate the management of provider commitments which, in turn, enhanced the effectiveness, reliability and robustness of a deployed process. (3) An example where the use of the concepts from ARIZ broke through apparent incompatibilities between demanded qualities of the injured person and the insurance regulations.

1997 Proceedings

Prioritizing Customer Requirements in a Rapidly Changing Marketplace by Bill Naccarato of Dade International, Inc. Changes in health care financing methods have led to substantial changes in health care delivery, which provide a significant challenge for new product development in the industry. Using a structured process for product definition, Dade is now developing an analyzer that will facilitate workstation consolidation within hospital clinical laboratory. This talk presents an overview of how the change in the health care market affect design of analyzers. Using actual data, the presentation will demonstrate the techniques used to process information and prioritize customer requirements.

A QFD-Based Evaluation of Prevention Services by Robert F. Hales, ProAction Development, Inc., Pamela Clark and Don Lakes of TriHealth. With financial incentives changing in the healthcare environment, healthcare organizations, physicians, and employers need to become focused on developing and offering health services that are designed to prevent, or minimize the impact of illness or injury. This paper will describe the process used to develop an overall corporate strategy, structure and service based solely on the benefits TriHealth's customers desire from a Prevention Services provider.

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1996 Proceedings

A Customer Integrated Decision Making/QFD Project by a Multi-function Team of Health Care Providers Planning a Treatment System for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) by Douglas W. Penz, PhD, Judith Daniels, MD, Thomas E. D'Erminio, LISW, BC, and Bill Barnard, BS, CS, CPIM (USA). A team including a physician, clinical psychologist, and clinical social worker is using CIDM/QFD to identify customers and their needs for treatment of adult ADD. The treatment facility is expected to open in the summer of 1996.

1995 Proceedings

QFD Robust Design and Professional Services: Hospital Emergency Room Case, S. Macfarlane and K. Eager, Black Sheep Engineering Services. This paper describes what the authors believe is a new application of Robust Design Methods. This study challenges the paradigm that Robust Design does not apply to a service or social science. The point is made through a case study involving optimization of the process of a hospital emergency in which average patient length of stay was reduced by 25% without major capital investment for an expanded facility. Confirmation runs also showed excellent repeatability, proving that Robust Design Method can be used to optimize processes outside the product development arena.

Happy Feet, Part II: The Return of the Princeton Foot Clinic -or- The QFD Viral Strategy, J. Gibson, Baptist Health System. A hospital-based foot treatment service was developed, using QFD principles to identify the spoken and unspoken needs of customers, including comprehensive patient self-care, and timely follow-up on patient outcomes to referring physicians. This paper reports the QFD process and the results, that not only enabled the clinic to overcome internal political hurdles, but also led to greater awareness of the customer among all parties involved with the clinic and strengthen the customer focus in the larger rehabilitation services and the entire outpatient scheduling system.

Reconciling Different Customer Needs, I. Ferguson, Ferguson Associates, UK. For a product to compete and to contribute to company market share, requires various differing features of the product to be highly evaluated by different levels of customer. These differing features can often require what would appear to be conflicting values for the product to have high evaluation. This paper shows the identification of the internal/external supplier - customer - supplier - customer hierarchy as illustrated in the healthcare industry. An effective two stage mechanism is described that evaluates the design features at each level of deployment, by linking the relative level needs, enabling a rational choice of values to be made at each level that will result in high satisfaction at teach level of customer.

1994 Proceedings

Applying QFD In Health Care Services - The Princeton Foot Clinic, J. Gibson, Baptist Health System. Increasing competition, shrinking bottom lines and the push for health reform are forcing hospitals to differentiate in the delivery of services. One way to achieve this is to consistently deliver what customers want and further, what will delight them. The paper reports how the Clinic's task force consisting of clinicians, marketers and TQM staff was able to design a new service with built-in quality with the help of QFD and ensure clinicians to hear the voice of the customer above the high tech din of healthcare.

Designing The Voice Of The Customer Into A New Hospital Surgery Center, S. Macfarlane and K. Eager, The Quality Advisor, Inc. Healthcare is changing. Kennewick General Hospital in Washington needed to stay competitive. But how do you change the process by which hospitals and their employees provide care in an efficient, customer oriented way? This paper reports the progress made at the hospital by a cross-functional QFD team to design the surgery process for their new surgery center. The method, what worked and what did not, and recommendations for others in a similar situation and hospitals wanting to remain competitive.

Cardiac Arrest! QFD On The Heart And Soul Of A Medical Center, V. Alterescu, D. Newhart, and F. Tiedemann, John Muir Medical Center. This is a case study involving three distinct QFD projects in separate clinical service areas: Cardiology, Oncology, and Rehabilitation, all undergoing radical market and governmental reform and competitor threats. Through the use of QFD, an interdisciplinary team was able to focus on developing services which are systematically tied to customer desires in each project. Had QFD not been done for these projects, the organization would have attempted a very different set of services built around the voice of single internal customer. The paper reports their QFD steps in three projects.

QFD In Health Care: Identifying Methods To Tailor QFD To A Service Industry. A Case Study At The University Of Michigan Medical Center, D. Erlich and E. Kratochwill, University of Michigan Medical Center. The University of Michigan Medical Center piloted QFD in a new unit which consolidated several diagnostic procedures into one unit. The objective was to learn when QFD is mot appropriate for a hospital, and to stimulate service volume at the new unit. The paper discusses 1) UMMC QFD approach, 2) the difficulties experienced in applying QFD to healthcare, 3) the benefits derived from QFD, and 4) the ways to tailor QFD to healthcare and the service sector.

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1993 Proceedings

Applying QFD to Health Care Services: A case Study at the University of Michigan Medical Center, Deborah M. Elrich, PH.D. and Dennis J. Hertz, University of Michigan Medical Center. The University of Michigan Medical Center piloted QFD in a new unit which consolidated several separated diagnostic procedures into one unit. Based upon early TQM success, the organization employed QFD to realign resources to meet the valid customer requirements of the combined groups in order to stimulate service volume by better satisfying customer desires. The team is now completing the A-1 matrix. This paper discusses the Medical Center's approach, reports experiences learned, identify changes which have been implemented, quantify the financial benefits which have resulted from these changes, and offer ideas on how best utilize QFD at a referral hospital.

Market Expansion Analysis Through QFD, J. A. Miller, Quality Processing Consulting, H. N. Tucker, Clintec Nutrition. This paper presents the approach and findings from a House of Quality based analysis of how the market leading company could cause expansion of the entire clinical nutrition business worldwide.

1992 Proceedings

Hospital Marketing's Role in TQI: QFD, Duane Loller, Meadville Medical Center. With the advent of TQM programs in hospitals, the marketers have a unique opportunity to both further the objectives of marketing effort and develop a close link to operations. This paper examines the experience of the Meadville Medical Center with the development of a research system using QFD tools. The linkage of existing market research programs with a QFD matrix has yielded improved quality of customer research and improved acceptance of the output.

Multi-phase QFD Studies for Product and Services Development, Joe A. Miller, The Focus Consulting Group, Inc., Armando Bombino, Baxter Healthcare Corporation. When QFD is implemented as a structured component of a customer satisfaction driven TQM process, it helps link the basic concepts of TQM into the product and service development processes. Training cross-functional product or service development teams in multiple phase applications of QFD and facilitating those teams to rapidly develop all of the QFD matrices pertinent to the full cycle from concept through product introduction enables critical decision and information needs to be identified earlier in the development cycle. This is demonstrated through a range of applications in this paper.

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