Hospitals have developed something of a reputation for being rife with bad processes. When processes are not adequate, the result is an abundance of workarounds: nurses looking for missing equipment, staff bending the official procedure to keep care moving, and teams fixing the immediate symptom without fixing the system that created it.

One AHRQ PSNet perspective reports that nurses spent 33 minutes of a 7.5-hour shift on workarounds outside their job description. That kind of firefighting may keep the shift moving, but it does not remove the root cause.

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Quality assurance is not a final check before launch. A reliable QA process starts when requirements are written, continues through test planning and execution, and keeps running after release through defect tracking, regression testing, and reporting.

For a startup, the right QA stack should do three things without adding process drag: document the work, catch defects early, and make each release easier to trust. These five tools cover the core jobs: workflow control, bug tracking, browser automation, low-code test creation, and GUI regression testing.

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Building an environmental management system (EMS) to ISO 14001 once meant huge, complex manuals and a labyrinthine system of paper forms: slow to implement, hard to navigate, and a nightmare to keep in step with how the business actually works. It does not have to work that way anymore.

This guide gives you five free ISO 14001 checklist templates for environmental management, ready to run, plus the context to put them to work: what ISO 14001 covers, how the standard is structured, and how to use the templates to build, audit, and maintain a compliant EMS.

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The way customers see it, your software release cycle looks like this: take ages developing the software, beta test it, add a few features, fix a few bugs, and ship. That is not real life. Beta testing is only one type of software testing your product needs before customers trust it.

Software testing works best as a layered system. Unit tests catch flaws inside small pieces of code. Integration tests catch broken handoffs. System tests check the whole product. User acceptance testing confirms real users can do the job the software was built for.

This article compiles 16 COVID-19 Procedures for Hospitals according to clinical experience from FAHZU, based on the 2020 Handbook of COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment from The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine.

The templates below are operational examples for hospitals and medical centers designing infection prevention and control workflows, patient-placement procedures, PPE steps, disinfection routines, waste handling, exposure response, and discharge follow-up. They should be reviewed against current WHO, CDC, national, local, and facility-specific guidance before use.

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Load testing tells you how your website, app, or API behaves before traffic exposes a weak point in public. If users complain about a sluggish site, if performance drops when traffic is high, or if a new feature makes the system lag, load testing gives you evidence before the next release.

Load testing is a branch of software performance testing. It subjects a website or application to simulated workloads that stretch its operational capacity so you can assess performance, reliability, and recovery before slow pages affect user experience, search performance, or conversion.

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Lion Containers Ltd is the UK’s leading shipping container conversion and modification company, transforming standard shipping containers into bespoke modular projects; from secure storage solutions and office units to pop-up shop complexes complete with insulation, electrics, solar panels, and full-length windows.

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Would you eat a McDonalds Big Mac that was out-of-date, had been dropped on the floor, and made with a stranger’s bare hands?

No! Me neither.

Unfortunately, that’s what thousands of people in China, unknowingly, did.

Back in 2015, the Chinese meat suppliers for McDonald’s were secretly filmed and caught:

“Handling meat and chicken with their bare hands, taking meat that had fallen on the floor and adding it back on to the production line…and forging production dates on beef patties.” – ET2C, Lessons on the Importance of Quality Control Checks

Around 4,300 McDonalds beef patties were tested and found to be out-of-date and contaminated with bacteria.

As a result, over 2,000 McDonald’s outlets across Asia were dramatically affected. The reputation of McDonald’s and their meat supplier was irreversibly damaged, and McDonald’s saw a 7.3% drop in sales.

McDonald’s was definitely not ‘lovin it’.

If only they’d used Enterprise Quality Management Software (EQMS) to regulate their supplier’s meat handling processes and control the quality of the produce they were delivering.

Companies who use EQMS to manage quality, experience fewer product quality issues (less than 1%), and improve their productivity by 20%.

Keen to find out more? Join me in this Process Street post as we run through the following:

• What is EQMS and how does it work?
• Who uses EQMS?
• Is EQMS it just for regulated organizations?
• What are the bottlenecks of EQMS?
• The best EQMS alternative (+free templates)?
• Top 8 EQMS software

Let’s make our way through the golden arches and get started!
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Implementing a quality management system (QMS software) is an important investment companies cannot overlook.

One Harvard Business Review study found that companies with an ISO 9001 certification have much higher rates of “corporate survival, sales, employment growth, and wage increases than a matched group of non-adopters.”

For instance, 65% of companies save $25,000 or more in costs within their first year of implementing a QMS.

Adopting a QMS software can also boost efficiency and consistency of work, increase customer satisfaction, raise product value, and reduce unnecessary costs and overall risks.

A good quality management system is all about achieving a quality-driven culture within your company, and as a result, making your product better and marketing it faster. But in order to access these benefits, it’s important that you choose the right QMS solution for you and your company.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be going over the foundation of everything you need to know before choosing your quality management system software.

We’ll be covering:

• What is a quality management system (QMS)?
• Agile QMS
• Best QMS software
• Build your agile QMS with Process Street

Understanding quality and seeking to improve it is arguably the core purpose behind undertaking process improvements. Hence the creation of the Deming cycle.

But where did this philosophy of process improvement come from?

One key person is William Edwards Deming – sometimes referred to as Edward W. Deming. He’s principally a statistician, but one could even call him a philosopher of science.

Deming’s goal was to reapply the scientific method to business processes, and has left us with two main variants of his thinking: PDSA and PDCA.

In this article we’ll outline:

• What the Deming cycle is, with its history
• How to apply the Deming cycle to improve your business processes
• The important distinction between PDSA and PDCA
• How PDSA is employed in the medical field

Deming’s approach is not just about improving processes, but about improving a whole business.

In a recent meta-study from the British Medical Journal, researchers found only 2 out of 73 studies had applied PDSA in a way which fully met criteria. Commenting:

To progress the development of the science of improvement, a greater understanding of the use of improvement methods, including PDSA, is essential to draw reliable conclusions about their effectiveness.

And that’s why we’re writing this article!