INTRODUCTION Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) and Total Quality Management (TQM) are gaining acceptance in many of today’s health care delivery systems. Hospitals have incorporated this philosophy both as a means of enhancing quality of patient care through continuous improvement and to improve efficiency and effectiveness of management, but also to satisfy the Joint Commission on Accredita...

Regression benchmarking is a methodology for detecting performance changes in software by periodic benchmarking. Detecting performance regressions in particular helps to improve software quality, similarly as regression testing, which however focuses only on software functionality. To achieve an acceptable level of false alarms, regression benchmarking requires a statistically sound planning an...

A benchmarking procedure ranks real-valued acts by the probability that they outperform a benchmark β; that is, an act f is evaluated by means of the functional V (f) = P (f ≥ β). Expected utility is a special case of benchmarking procedure, where the acts and the benchmark are stochastically independent. This paper provides axiomatic characterizations of preference relations that are represent...

This paper covers “soft measures” that can be used in a “stick and carrot” strategy to improve accessibility to web sites. Two examples of benchmarking are presented. The first is the benchmarking of 700 Norwegian public web sites that has been carried out three times the last years, giving experiences on how to carry out the analyses and how to use the results for awareness raising and stimula...

We benchmarked many implementations of all remaining SHA-3 candidate algorithms on several platforms. The benchmarking method used in this report is called XBX, short for eXternal Benchmarking eXtension, an extension of the SUPERCOP-eBASH framework [7] that allows benchmarking small devices. For details on how XBX works, please see [3]. The main sources of candidate implementations were SUPERCO...

Interoperability is the ability of two or more systems to interchange information and to use the information that has been interchanged. Nowadays, interoperability between ontology development tools is low. Therefore, to assess and improve this interoperability, we propose to perform a benchmarking of the interoperability of ontology development tools using RDF(S) as the interchange language. T...

We present a benchmarking study on the companies in the Turkish food industry based on their financial data. Our aim is to develop a comprehensive benchmarking framework using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and information visualization. Besides DEA, a traditional tool for financial benchmarking based on financial ratios is also incorporated. The consistency/inconsistency between the two metho...

Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Abstract This memo discusses and defines a number of terms that are used in describing performance benchmarking tests and the results of such tests. The terms defined in this memo will be used in additional memos to define specific benc...

A pervasive problem in the field of optimization algorithms is the lack of meaningful and consistent algorithm benchmarking methodology. This includes but is not limited to issues of the selection of problem instances, the selection of algorithm specifications, the algorithm configuration parameters, and interpretation of results. The intention of this paper is to summarize the literature relat...

The paper gives an overview of RTJBench, a framework designed to assist in the task of benchmarking programs written in the Real-Time Specification for Java, but with potentially more general applicability. RTJBench extends the JUnit framework for unit testing of Java applications with tools for real-time environment configuration, simple data processing and configurable graphical presentation ...