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Hospital medication errors are costly and contribute to patient mortality, morbidity, and decreased health care quality. Errors result from poor systems design more commonly than from healthcare staff performance. As such, a focus should be directed to process design. This action research study examines the application of Lean Six Sigma to reduce inpatient pharmacy dispensing errors in a Thai public hospital. Through the successful application of multiple Lean Six Sigma tools, the implementation of Lean Six Sigma reduced monthly dispensing errors from 29 incidents to 6 incidents over 14,000 total inpatient days between March 2018 and November 2019, and improved patient safety. Lean Six Sigma tools used in this study were cause-and-effect diagrams, spaghetti diagrams, five-why analysis, project charters, brainstorming, control charts, and hypothesis testing. This case study can improve hospital manager and medical director awareness of Lean Six Sigma and its benefits relative to the prevention and reduction of medication errors.

Modern radio interferometers such as the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) are capable of producing data at hundreds of gigabits to terabits per second. This high data rate makes the analysis of radio data cumbersome and computationally expensive. While high performance computing facilities exist for large national and international facilities, that may not be the case for instruments operated by a single institution or a small consortium. Data rates for next generation radio telescopes are set to eclipse those currently in operation, hence local processing of data will become all the more important. Here, we introduce the REAL-time Transient Acquisition backend (REALTA), a computing backend at the Irish LOFAR station (I-LOFAR) which facilitates the recording of data in near real-time and post-processing. We also present first searches and scientific results of a number of radio phenomena observed by I-LOFAR and REALTA, including pulsars, fast radio bursts (FRBs), rotating radio transients (RRATs), the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), Jupiter, and the Sun.

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