The Health Care Data Guide is designed for students and professionals who want to improve their health care organizations.?This book focuses on developing skills in using data for improvement, a challenge and source of frustration to many.??In thoughtful stepwise fashion, this book teaches how to make improvements more readily and with greater confidence that their changes truly are improvements. A core focus of the book is statistical process control (SPC), a philosophy, a strategy, and a set of methods for ongoing improvement of processes and systems to yield better outcomes.? As a practice, SPC includes a focus on processes, stratification, rational subgrouping and methods to predict future performance of processes such as stability and capability analysis, all of which are covered in this book, as are measurement, data collection methods, planned experimentation, and graphical methods (such as run charts, frequency plots, Pareto analysis, scatter diagrams, and flow diagrams). This book shows how to apply SPC to evaluate current process performance, search for ideas for improvement, tell if changes have resulted in evidence of improvement, and track implementation efforts to document sustainability of the improvement.? Part I: Using Data for Improvement Chapter 1: Improvement Methodology Chapter 2: Obtaining Data for Improvement Chapter 3 Understanding Variation Using Run Charts Chapter 4 Learning From Variation in Data Chapter 5 Understanding Variation Using Shewhart Charts Part II.