Dr. Noah Tahl has learned about the use of control charts, standard deviations, and histograms—all in a 2-hour workshop that he attended during a national health care conference. He has seen for himself how these concepts help hospitals and other health care institutions to organize and analyze their data, and is determined to use statistical process control to improve measures of quality at St. Maybe Hospital. In this effort, he engages his staff in a training effort to assure that all members of his department will be on the same page when it comes to statistics.

And speaking of pages, he keeps at least a page ahead of the group that he is training in these methods. So while everyone else may be on the same page, Dr. Noah Tahl stays up late at night to assure himself that he knows more than those whom he is training. It’s a never-ending struggle to stay ahead.

After he has demonstrated the formula for calculating standard deviation, and shown his trainees how control charts and histograms will help them understand processes, he introduces CHARTrunner a software program that creates charts from data in established spreadsheets such as Excel. “This will make your life easier,” he promises, but as it turns out, it may be on the verge of making his own life harder.

Alec Smart, one of his department managers, comes across the concept of the coefficient of variation as he explores the printout of his charted data. “What does it mean when the coefficient of variation is 11.92?” he asks.