This volume provides the important concepts necessary for a physician to participate in a reengineering process, develop decision-making skills based on probability and logic rather than rules, and to measure and analyze meaningful outcomes of care delivery. This approach has been developed over ten years in a medical student-based program and has been enthusiastically embraced by medical students without backgrounds in engineering or statistics. More specifically, this text will introduce physicians to relevant and available computer software, combined with an in depth knowledge of measurement, variation, and uncertainty. It provides a basis for the transformation of data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. The first quarter of the book will address understanding and visualizing data, using statistical and graphic analysis.