Monitoring Disease, New Application of Profiles Monitoring - Case Study: Pulmonary Disease

The application of statistical process control methods to health care is facing an expansion in the recent days. In some statistical process control applications, quality of a process or product is characterized by a relationship between two or more variables which is referred to as a "profile". Profile monitoring method plays a very important part in statistical control process. Unfortunately eventhough it proved to be a successful application in some industrial cases it was not used in medical field so far. In this paper, profile monitoring, in phase I and II, is performed on Pulmonary Function Test for a patient. A profile that can be represented as a polynomial regression is used here. Among the existing methods in monitoring of polynomial profiles, F-approach and orthogonal polynomial method are considered for phase I and II respectively. This real case illustrates profile monitoring as an appropriate and effective method in improving health care.