Expert system model for implementing statistical process control in the health care industry

Today's health care industry is under increased pressure to become more efficient and cost effective. In addition, hospitals are now required to adopt the techniques and methods of Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) as part of their accreditation requirements. One of the main challenges facing health care providers implementing CQI is how to manage, control and improve processes using Statistical Process Control (SPC) techniques, especially control charts. This paper describes the development of an SPC expert system which is designed to advise hospital personnel how to measure and control their processes effectively using different types of control charts such as X-bar and R-charts, P-charts, IC-charts and Individual-X and Moving charts. The SPC expert system is implemented in GURU, a menu driven, totally integrated expert system development tool. The structure of the SPC expert system is described and examples, using actual data from a local hospital are presented. A complete step-by-step interactive session with the expert system is also shown. Finally, the effectiveness of the SPC Expert System is evaluated and the feasibility of linking the expert system directly to SPC software packages is explored.