Draft in progress

Statistical Process Control for Healthcare with R, by Barry, Bettinger, and Cooper.

Statistical process control (SPC) was a triumph of manufacturing analytics, and its success spread across a variety of industries---most improbably, into healthcare.

Healthcare is rarely compatible with the idea of an assembly line, but lean manufacturing thinking ("Lean") has taken over healthcare management around the world, and SPC methods are common tools in Lean. Unlike in manufacturing, stability is an inherently tricky concept in healthcare, so this has led to much misuse of these methods. Bad methods lead to bad inferences, and bad inferences can lead to poor decisions. This book aims to help analysts apply SPC methods more accurately in healthcare, using the statistical software R.