Two charts gaining more use in the Quality
Improvement field of late are the Paynter chart
and the Spider or Radar Chart.
As you know, the Pareto chart, using the Pareto
Principle, identifies the vital few versus the
trivial many. It is a tool used to focus efforts
on these vital few. The Paynter chart takes
the Pareto chart one step further. The Paynter
chart adds more information to the Pareto by
breaking the Pareto bars into subgroups of interest.
The following is an example of a Pareto of
Medical Error Classifications. One would certainly
use this chart to concentrate on the classification
MS0001 and perhaps FS0001.
If a Paynter chart were drawn against this data
but using a subgroup of Facility we might see
a chart such as:
As you can see the groups of bars are ordered
by the total Med Errors, similar to the Pareto.
Each Pareto bar is replaced by 3 bars indicating
the number of Med Errors at each facility.
This chart, then, gives us further important
information of the Medical Errors, perhaps giving
us some clues in our search for the root cause,
or perhaps illustrating a more outstanding problem
as in the second Med Error Code and the third
Facility. It may point one to analyzing the
appropriate Shewhart charts in depth.
The data for the Paynter chart is made up of
that which you would run a Pareto chart on with
additional subgrouping data. There are many
candidates for subgrouping including date based
(day, month), organizational (facility, floor,
department, etc) or anything else that might
be helpful in detecting differences that would
be useful in finding the root cause.
While the Paynter is somewhat of a drilldown
chart, the Spider Plot or Radar chart is a summary
or rollup type of chart. It brings together
in one view, the measures for several different
areas of consideration and comparison. This
type of chart indicates at a glance where the
organization is excelling and where some attention
may be needed.
Each area or spoke reports a number within
a common range such as 0 to 10 or 0 to 5 indicating
where that area falls in the relation to the
degree of that which is being measured. Numbers
reported in this range mean generally the same
thing in each area. A 5 means the same in Best
People for example as it does in Best Performance
in regards to the level of compliance, performance,
improvement or other measure.
We have illustrated the Spider plot on our
Statit e-QC demo web as detailed in another
article in this newsletter.
Each area’s number is then plotted on
one spoke of the spider web. A line is drawn
connecting each of the reports. As well as,
a baseline and a target for each of the areas
are plotted on the chart with a line connecting
each of these.
A quick glance will tell the viewer where the
organization is excelling and where the there
may be problems that need attention.
With Statit e-QC, the plotted points can drill
down to another layer. The chart above was produced
by clicking on the Best People node of the following
chart.
These tools can be important indicators for
a Quality Improvement program is any organization.
While the examples above illustrate some of
the problem-solving strengths of these tools,
they are both valuable in many situations. Think
of what you can use these for in your own situation.
