Abstract
The objective of this pilot study was to assess the inter-rater reliability of a newly developed A3 Quality Assessment (QA) rubric to evaluate the quality of completed Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) projects that used an A3 Thinking Tool (A3) for problem solving. One A3 was independently reviewed by 7 PDSA experts using 5 main levels and 22 sublevels. Evaluations were compared and coded for agreement and used for statistical analysis. Fleiss’ kappa statistics was performed to test for inter-rater reliability between experts across 5 main and 22 sublevels. Preliminary results suggest that the A3 QA rubric meets reliability criteria with a moderate level of agreement beyond chance alone (κ = 0.44) and it is applicable to measure progress on problem solving abilities spearheaded via PDSA cycles. Additional verification testing is needed across multiple A3 improvement projects completed in multiple A3 Thinking templates.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our A3 reviewers (Ilario Costa, Becky Dodge, John McCreery, Heidi Troxler, Sabrina Vereen, Erica Wolak, and Nathan Woody) who helped develop the A3 QA rubric and who utilized it to assign scores on the A3 for our preliminary study. We would also like to thank all of those who helped provide feedback on the development of the rubric, including UNC Healthcare’s Operational Efficiency. We thank other members of the Division of Healthcare Engineering for helpful conversations and development of the research study. We would like to express our gratitude to the leadership in Radiation Oncology and Oncology in the North Carolina Cancer Hospital for allowing us to do this research and continue to advance the use of A3 improvement projects to improve the quality of care for our patients.
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Amos, A. et al. (2017). Assessing the Quality of the A3 Thinking Tool for Problem Solving. In: Ahram, T., Karwowski, W. (eds) Advances in The Human Side of Service Engineering. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 494. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41947-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41947-3_6
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