Desirable or Unacceptable

Is It Feasible or Desirable?

During the past decade, advances in device technology (eg, drug-eluting stents), development of safer anticoagulants (eg, bivalirudin), and refinement in procedural techniques have led to a dramatic improvement in the effectiveness and safety of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), despite increasing clinical and anatomic complexity of treated patients.1 As safety and effectiveness have be...

Errors, mistakes, blunders, outliers, or unacceptable results: how many?

We have studied 219353 individual clinical chemistry results obtained in methods comparison studies. Each result was prospectively compared with its replicate, comparative, or repeat value to identify differences from expected values. Unacceptable results were defined as differing from the expected values by < or = 7 SDs or CVs. We believe these differences represent special-cause variation and...

Unnecessary uncertainty is unacceptable.

Value and Unacceptable Risk

Consider a transitive value ordering of outcomes and lotteries on outcomes, which satisfies substitutivity of equivalents and obeys “continuity for easy cases,” i.e., allows compensating risks of small losses by chances of small improvements. Temkin (2001) has argued that such an ordering must also – rather counter-intuitively – allow chances of small improvements to compensate risks of huge lo...

Unacceptable emergency wait times.