When Health Affairs surveyed a nationally representative sample of board chairs of 1,000 U.S. not-for-profit hospitals, it found that fewer than half rated quality of care as one of their two top priorities, and only one-third of the boards received formal quality training. Only 63% included quality performance on every board agenda.

The magazine ranked the hospitals by publicly-reported quality measures for acute myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, and pneumonia. As the abstract for the article describing the survey concluded, “The large differences in board activities between high-performing and low-performing hospitals we found suggest that governing boards may be an important target for intervention for policymakers hoping to improve care in U.S. hospitals.” You can read the article online here.

The Baldrige Criteria address senior leaders’ responsibilities for improving the quality of care but do not specifically link this to hospitals’ boards. The Criteria ask how you evaluate the performance of board members and how you use those reviews to improve the effectiveness of individual members and of the board as a whole.

Based on the findings of the Health Affairs study, hospitals would benefit from providing formal quality training for their board members, making the hospital’s quality performance a part of every board meeting, and holding boards accountable for performance on key quality of care measures. When that happens, quality of care will become one of the board’s—and, one would expect, the hospital’s—top priorities.

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