From stoplight reports to time series: equipping boards and leadership teams to drive better decisions

One of us was shown a letter received by a hospital infection control leader from the CEO congratulating her on an excellent monthly performance—for the previous month MRSA infections had decreased from 4 to 2 cases. A couple of months later the same CEO sent a letter expressing serious concern, asking for an explanation of why the monthly MRSA cases had doubled from 2 to 4. Implicit in the CEO's letter is an all too common misunderstanding when using point-to-point data comparisons that every data point is a signal of meaningful change. Absent any information about or understanding of the nature and extent of the underlying variation of the process or event type being analysed, in point-to-point comparisons the only thing one can be sure of is that the second data point will likely be either higher or lower than the preceding data point. Common to board members, corporate-suite...
Source: BMJ Quality and Safety - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Editorials Source Type: research