Modeling the patient mix for risk-adjusted CUSUM charts.

The improvement of surgical quality and the corresponding early detection of its changes is of increasing importance. To this end, sequential monitoring procedures such as the risk-adjusted CUmulative SUM chart are frequently applied. The patient risk score population (patient mix), which considers the patients' perioperative risk, is a core component for this type of quality control chart.

Monitoring data quality for telehealth systems in the presence of missing data.

Background: All-in-one station-based health monitoring devices are implemented in elder homes in Hong Kong to support the monitoring of vital signs of the elderly. During a pilot study, it was discovered that the systolic blood pressure was incorrectly measured during multiple weeks. A real-time solution was needed to identify future data quality issues as soon as possible.

Risk-adjusted CUSUM charts under model error.

In recent years, quality control charts have been increasingly applied in the healthcare environment, for example, to monitor surgical performance. Risk-adjusted cumulative (CUSUM) charts that utilize risk scores like the Parsonnet score to estimate the probability of death of a patient from an operation turn out to be susceptible to misfitted risk models causing deterioration of the charts' properties, in particular, the false alarm behavior. Our approach considers the application of power transformations in the logistic regression model to improve the fit to the binary outcome data.

A simple signaling rule for variable life-adjusted display derived from an equivalent risk-adjusted CUSUM chart.

The variable life-adjusted display (VLAD) is the first risk-adjusted graphical procedure proposed in the literature for monitoring the performance of a surgeon. It displays the cumulative sum of expected minus observed deaths. It has since become highly popular because the statistic plotted is easy to understand.