A Practical Guide to Creating a Pareto Chart as a Quality Improvement Tool.

Abstract

Quality is always a hot topic in healthcare, and the ultimate goals are to maintain a high level of patient satisfaction and improve the financial aspects. These two goals are rapidly changing, and they could be affected by many of the surrounding factors. When a healthcare organization faces a problem in achieving these two goals, it is important to understand the causes and immediately start the appropriate interventions. One principle of quality improvement in healthcare is to do it right the first time, so it is important to do the right intervention promptly by targeting the most vital contributing factors that led to the problem at hand. By nature, healthcare organizations are complicated, also have been described as a complex adaptive system, which is one of the most difficult systems to understand and manage because one problem could be linked to many contributing factors at the same time. The concept of the Pareto principle was developed in the 19th century by the economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by just 20% of the population. Moreover, he found that 80% of production usually came from only 20% of the companies. This led him to a general hypothesis that 80% of the results are originated from 20% of the factors or causes that influence the results. The Pareto principle, which is also known as the rule of 20/80, has become an important quality tool, recognized by the American Society for Quality (ASQ) as one of seven basic quality tools for process improvement. HOW IS A PARETO CHART USED FOR QUALITY IMPROVEMENT?