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Biography...

Paul E. Plsek
1005 Allenbrook Lane
Roswell, Georgia 30075
(770) 587-2492
paulplsek@directedcreativity.com

Professional Career

1977-1984	AT&T Bell Laboratories, Quality Assurance Center. Various engineering and management positions developing quality assurance plans for products and services used in the provisioning of telecommunications services.
1984-1985	AT&T Corporate Headquarters, Director of Corporate Quality Planning. Responsible for the planning and deployment of modern quality management systems throughout AT&T following the divestiture of the Bell System.
1985- present	Consultant in Quality Management, Paul E. Plsek & Associates, Inc. Offering consulting in Total Quality Management to various industries, most notably, health care. A partial list of clients includes: AT&T, Blue Cross, Hewlett Packard, Mars, Shell (England), Upjohn, Washington Gas, Green Mountain Power, the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, the Medical Center Hospital of Vermont, the HMO Group, VHA, The Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the Healthcare Forum, The Mayo Clinic, the SSM Health Care System, Healthpartners Minneapolis, the Buffalo General Hospital, DeKalb Medical Center, St. John's Health Center in Wyoming, the Providence Medical Center in Portland, the Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, the Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, the Prudential Healthcare System Southern Region, the Baptist Hospital in Memphis, Kaiser-Permanente, Healthsource, the Ontario Healthcare CQI Network (Canada), Bispebjerg Hospital (Denmark), The National Health Service (Britain), the Aga Khan Health System (Africa, Pakistan, and India), The National Health Service (Sweden), the Middle Eastern Healthcare Consortium (Jerusalem).

Education

B.S. Electrical Engineering. Texas A&M University, 1977. With high honors.

M.S. Electrical Engineering (Systems Engineering). Polytechnic Institute of New York, Brooklyn, 1979. With high honors.

Professional Offices

Co-chair, American Society for Quality Control (ASQC) National Quality Month Planning Committee. (1984-1991)

Editorial Review Board, Quality Press Books, ASQC. (1989-present)

Editorial Review Board, Quality Progress, ASQC. (1989-present)

Vice Chair, Editorial Review Board, Quality Progress, ASQC. (1991-1992)

Associate Editor, Quality Management in Health Care, ASPEN Publications. (1992-1994)

Associate Editor, New Medicine, Current Medicine Publishing. (1996-1997)

Editorial Advisory Board, Quality Review Bulletin, JCAHO. (1991-1995)

Senior Fellow, Institute For Healthcare Improvement (1997- present)

 

Books and Book Chapters

• Quality Improvement Tools, (co-author with A. Onnias and J. Early), Juran Institute Publication, 1989. A source book on the process and data analysis tools commonly used in quality improvement efforts.
  
  
• "A Primer on Quality Improvement Tools," chapter in Curing Health Care (by D. M. Berwick, A. B. Godfrey, and J. Roessner), Jossey-Bass, 1990. Summaries the use of quality improvement tools by the 23 health care institutions that participated in the National Demonstration Project on Quality Improvement in Health Care (NDP).
  
  
• Methods and Tools for Quality Improvement in Health Care, National Demonstration Project, Boston, 1990. Notebook and reference for a four-day advanced course for quality improvement leaders in health care. Medical CME credits issued through the Harvard School of Public Health.
  
  
• "Techniques for the Management of Quality" and "Directed Creativity and the Management of Quality in Healthcare," invited chapters in Handbook for Managing for Quality in Healthcare. Chip Caldwell, editor, in press. These two invited chapters cover both the basic tools of quality management and the new tools of directed creativity.
  
  
• "Reengineering and TQM" and "Bringing Creativity to Healthcare Reengineering Efforts," invited chapters to appear in Health Care Reengineering Guidebook. Paul Lenz, MD, editor, in press. These invited chapters describe the linkage between quality management, reengineering, and creative thinking.
  
  
• Creativity, Innovation and Quality. 1997. Milwaukee, WI: Quality Press. The first book to describe how the theory and methods of directed creativity can be applied to the management of quality.
  
  
• Edgeware: A Sourcebook for Managers on the Implications of Complexity Science, (co-authored with Brenda Zimmerman and Curt Lindberg), VHA Press, 1998. An introduction to leadership in complex adaptive systems.
  
  
• "Innovation: Mining the Creative Spirit" invited chapters in Managing Change in Healthcare: Innovative Solutions for People-Based Organizations. M.K. Key, Ph.D., editor, McGraw-Hill, 1999. Tapping creativity in times of organizational change.
  

Articles and Working Papers

• "Quality Tools: Meeting the Needs of Tomorrow's Industry," (with R. B. Ackerman and G. J. Surette), Quality Progress, October 1986; reprinted in Trends in Total Quality Management, published by IFS Publications, U.K., 1990. Describes how computer networking technology can be used to integrate quality management into all business operations.
  
  
• "Defining Quality At The Marketing/Development Interface," Quality Progress, June 1987. Explains the dimensions of quality and describes how to use market research techniques in quality planning.
  
  
• "Quality Improvement Through Discovery Learning," Transactions of the 1988 Annual Quality Congress, May 1988. Describes how to use new techniques in instructional technology to teach quality concepts and tools to managers who think they already know all they need to know.
  
  
• "FMEA For Process Quality Planning," Transactions of the 1989 Annual Quality Congress, May 1989. Describes how to adapt hardware reliability planning techniques to design quality into service processes.
  
  
• "Preliminary Results from a Quality Improvement Demonstration Program at the Brigham and Women's Hospital," (co-authored with Glenn Laffel, M.D.), Proceedings of the IMPRO 89 Conference, November 1989. Status report on efforts to implement modern quality management techniques at a large teaching hospital.
  
  
• "Improving the Quality of Ambulatory Health Care with Enhanced Medical Information Systems: Using the Computer to Diagnose Faulty Clinical Processes," (co-authored with N. J. Banks (principal author), R. H. Palmer, D. M. Berwick), Journal of Medical Systems, December, 1990. Describes observations from a research study on the numerous ways that common clinical processes can fail.
  
  
• "Tutorial: Control Charts," Quality Management in Health Care, Fall 1992. Introduces health care quality improvement practitioners to the basic statistical principles behind the classic Shewhart control chart.
  
  
• "Quality Improvement Project Models," Quality Management in Health Care, Winter 1993. Survey of the literature on models and concepts for problem solving and quality improvement. Includes a review of the similarities and differences among three quality improvement project models in common use in healthcare organizations.
  
  
• "The Seven Management and Planning Tools," Quality Management in Health Care, Spring, 1993. Describes seven tools that are used to support planning for quality management in Japanese and some progressive American organizations.
  
  
• "Strategic Quality Planning," Working Paper, co-authored with Gayle Capozzalo. Describes work in progress to revise the strategic planning process of the SSM Health Care System using concepts from quality management such as hoshin planning.
  
  
• "Planning for Data Collection, Parts 1 and 2" Quality Management in Health Care, Winter and Spring, 1994. Presents a systematic process for designing and executing valid studies.
  
  
• "Directed Creativity," Quality Management in Health Care, Spring, 1994. Survey of the literature on creative thinking. Presents creative thinking as a basic cognitive process that anyone can implement.
  
  
• "Techniques for the Management of Quality," Hospital and Health Services Administration. Spring, 1995 40(1). Describes the methods and tools commonly used to improve quality in health care organizations.
  
  
• "Sample Size," Quality Management in Health Care, Fall, 1994. Describes statistical calculations for determining the appropriate sample size in studies.
  
  
• "The P-D Crowbar," Quality Connection, Spring, 1994, vol. 3, no. 2. Provides practical advice for overcoming the problem of inaction after planning.
  
  
• "Interpreting Quality Improvement Data With Time Series Analysis" (co-authored with Roger Hand (principal author) and Harry Roberts). Quality Management in Health Care, Spring, 1995. A case study of the use of statistical time series analysis techniques applied to quality improvement data.
  
  
• "Variability in Clinical Systems: Applying Industrial Quality Control to Health Systems" (co-authored with Naomi Banks (principal author), Heather Palmer, and Donald Berwick). Joint Commission Journal on Quality Improvement, August 1995. Describes a research project that we conducted to quantify the amount of variability in the execution of clinical processes in a large HMO.
  
  
• "Tapping Creativity in Healthcare Organizations," Quality Letter for Healthcare Leaders-CQI Annual 1995. November 1995. Outlines techniques for bringing creative thinking into strategic planning and process design.
  
  
• "Bringing Creativity to the Pursuit of Quality," Proceedings of the American Society for Quality Control's 50th Annual Quality Congress. May 1996. Outlines techniques for bringing directed creativity to the challenges facing quality managers.
  
  
• "The Challenge of Reengineering in Healthcare" New Medicine, January 1997. Describes barriers to reengineering that healthcare organizations face.
  
  
• "The Systematic Design of Health Care Processes," Quality in Health Care: British Medical Journal. March 1997. Describes the concepts and tools of process redesign, and its application in healthcare organizations.
  
  
• "La Creatividad en Busca de la Calidad" Qualitas Hodie (Spain), April 1997. Spanish translation of "Bringing Creativity to Quality" (see entry above).
  
  
• "Collaborating Across Organizational Boundaries for Improvement," American Journal of Infection Control. April, 1997. Describes early efforts by various health care organizations to work together in collaborative benchmarking efforts to improve the quality of health care.
  
  
• "Creativity in Process Redesign and Reengineering" Proceedings of the American Society for Quality Control's 51st Annual Quality Congress. May 1997. Application of directed creativity in process design.
  
  
• "Criatividade e inovacao em busca da qualidade" and "Um exemplo do uso da criatividade dirigida" Empresas & Tendencias (Brazil), Fourth Quarter, 1997. Portuguese translation of "Bringing Creativity to the Pursuit of Quality" (see entry above).
  
  
• "Creativity and Quality at the Customer Interface" Proceedings of the American Society for Quality's Customer-Supplier Division Conference. November 1997. Application of directed creativity in customer needs analysis.
  
  
• "Incorporating the Tools of Creativity Into Quality Management" Quality Progress. March 1998. The case for bringing methods of creativity into the standard tool set of quality management.
  
  
• "A Whole Brain Breakfast" (with Robert Alan Black) Creativity in Action, April, 1998. Reconciling the right-brain and left-brain approach to creativity.
  
  
• "Quality Improvement in Clinical Medicine" Pediatrics, 101:1, January 1999. An overview of quality improvement methods in healthcare.

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