All Posts Tagged With: "Baldrige Award"
Baldrige Program Update
Our misguided Congress decided not to fund the Baldrige program in 2012. However, the Baldrige program will continue through the support of the Baldrige Foundation, a 501(c)3 organization that has pledged up to $5.2 million for the 2012 cycle. While that does not match the federal funding that was lost, it will keep the program going.
According to an email from Debbie Collard, chair of the Foundation, it “is committed to provide funding for FY2013 and beyond, commensurate with a budget-neutral private sector-funded business and financial model which is under development by a team of members from the Baldrige Enterprise.”
To reassure those organizations and leaders who are considering Baldrige or taking the first steps toward integrating it, the Baldrige program is not likely to end because it lost federal funding. The Foundation will provide essential support during the transition that must occur for the program to survive and thrive. In a Blogrige post, Baldrige program director Harry Hertz outlined the steps being taken to ensure the program’s sustainability:
12Dec2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued“We are actively working with our Enterprise partners (the Baldrige Foundation, the Alliance for Performance Excellence, and ASQ) to develop an Enterprise business and financial model that looks at Baldrige processes on an enterprise-wide scale, looking for revenue sources and efficiencies that can be gained. At the same time our internal Enterprise Transition Team, composed of five Baldrige staff members, is working on our own business model, as part…
Publisher Wins Baldrige Award
I grew up in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod: baptized and confirmed, eight years in parochial school, Sunday School and church every Sunday, graduated from Concordia College in St. Paul and taught for four years in a Missouri Synod elementary school. Concordia is a popular Missouri Synod name: The Concordia University System includes ten colleges and universities, many of the synod’s churches use the Concordia name, and the publishing arm of the synod is the Concordia Publishing House (CPH), which is the only non-healthcare recipient of the 2011 Baldrige Award.
It’s a well-deserved honor. CPH has 247 employees and revenues of $35 million and provides more than 8,000 products to members of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It excels at customer service, starting with 98% customer satisfaction scores, exceeding the benchmark for U.S. call centers. It’s Customer Call Center has been considered a “Center of Excellence” by Purdue University each of the last three years.
Innovation helps CPH build customer relationships. Its Center for Client Retention collects and analyzes data from customers of competitors, categorizing sales and customer trends in more than 50 different ways to correlate product sales and types of customers. Its Emerging Products team studies how to use new technologies to deliver innovative products. The number of electronic products offered by CPH grew from 457 in 2008 to 1,927 in 2010.
CPH also excels at building relationships with its employees. Overall workforce engagement has exceeded the AAIM…
8Dec2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA Patient First Culture
It’s likely that every medical center claims to put patients first. Those that actually put patients first can back up their claims with tangible results.
Schneck Medical Center, a 2011 Baldrige Award winner, is a 93-bed nonprofit hospital in southern Indiana. “At the forefront of Schneck’s commitment to excellence,” it states on its website, “is the Patient First Culture.” That culture has enabled Schneck to score 100% on 17 of 22 core measures reported for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Its patient satisfaction scores meet or exceed the top 10% or top 25% levels on nine of ten Press Ganey measures. Its hospital-acquired infection rate has been at or below 1% since 2008. It ranks second among 94 hospitals in its geographic region in value-based purchasing, which holds healthcare providers accountable for the quality and cost of their services.
An organization’s culture shapes its decisions. Schneck had limited treatment options for patients suffering myocardial infarctions, taking 120 minutes from the time a heart attack was diagnosed to the first intervention. To put these patients first, it collaborated with its largest competitor, located 25 miles away, to coordinate handing off patients who needed emergency cardiac catheterizations. The initiative has reduced the time between diagnosis and intervention to as low as 60 minutes.
A patient first culture does not mean that nothing else matters. Schneck also values workforce satisfaction: It has consistently been named one of Indiana’s…
5Dec2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA Unique Healthcare Delivery System
For the 55,000 Alaska Native and American Indian people it serves, Southcentral Foundation (SCF) has cut costly emergency room and urgent care visits by 50% and reduced specialty care by 65%, primary care visits by 36%, and hospital admissions by 53%. Such impressive results helped SCF win the 2011 Baldrige Award.
Of those SCF serves, 45,000 live in the Anchorage, Alaska, area and 10,000 live in 55 remote villages accessible only by plane. SCF serves them through a unique health care delivery system, the Nuka System of Care, that focuses strategies and processes on wellness. The system is owned, managed, directed, designed, and driven by Alaska Native people, which SCF calls “customer-owners.”
These unique ownership and health care delivery systems are producing impressive results:
- Customer-owners can see their primary care providers on the same day if they call by 4 p.m. and arrive by 4:30. Seventy to 80% of appointment slots are open at the start of each day.
- Alaska Natives and American Indian people experience diabetes at twice the national rate. Since 2009, SCF’s performance levels for diabetes care have exceeded the 90th percentile of the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information set.
- SFC manages key performance data through DataMall where it is collected, aggregated, trended, segmented, and available to managers, clinicians, customer-owners, and employees.
- SCF’s overall customer satisfaction rating in 2010 was 91%. Its overall satisfaction rating on Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) was 73.3%, significantly higher than…
Huge Health System Wins 2011 Baldrige Award
Kudos to the leaders at Henry Ford Health System, one of four Baldrige Award winners in 2011. It is very challenging for an organization to make the necessary systemic changes to produce repeatable world-class results. It is especially challenging when that organization has 140 sites: seven hospitals, 33 multispecialty ambulatory care centers, affiliated physician practices, a research and education component, the Health Alliance Plan (health insurance coverage for more than 467,000 members), and 91 community care operations.
Henry Ford Health System serves a three-county region encompassing Detroit and its suburbs with a workforce just shy of 30,000 employees, physicians, and volunteers. Its revenue in 2010 was $4.08 billion.
It’s hard to imagine the effort it has taken to keep this massive organization moving along the Baldrige path, but its results are a testament to its leaders’ tenacity:
- Rated #1 for member satisfaction among all health insurance plans in Michigan by J.D. Powers and Associates
- Satisfaction exceeding 90th percentile level for HFHS’s medical centers, with 80% likely to recommend
- Performance on CMS core measures at the 90th percentile for 75% of reporting areas across the system’s seven inpatient hospitals
- Evidence-based global harm campaign to improve patient safety recognized as a national best practice by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement
- Market leader in the area it serves, increasing inpatient market share by an average of 3% a year since 2004
- Maintained a positive net operating income despite significant increases in uncompensated care—approximately $200 million in 2010
- HFHS’s leaders…
2011 Baldrige Award Winners
Four organizations, three in healthcare and one nonprofit, have won the 2011 Baldrige Award:
- The Henry Ford Health System, a nonprofit organization based in Detroit, has more than 24,000 employees and operates 30 general medical centers and seven specialized medical facilities.
- Schneck Medical Center in Seymour, Indiana, is a nonprofit institution with 114 beds and a staff of more than 800 employees.
- Southcentral Foundation is an Alaska Native-owned, nonprofit healthcare organization serving nearly 60,000 Alaska Native and American Indian people in and around Anchorage.
- Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis is the publisher for The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, offering more than 8,000 products to families, individuals, Christian schools, and congregations.
Gary Meyer, president and CEO of Schneck Medical Center, noted that his organization first implemented the Baldrige framework four years ago. “The Baldrige criteria and our unwavering commitment to quality, satisfaction, and continuous improvement have helped us toward our vision to be an organization of excellence, every person, every time,” he said.
In 2011, 69 organizations applied for the Baldrige Award, of which 11 reached the final, site visit review stage. Six of the 11 were healthcare organizations. Baldrige examiners visited these site visit finalists for several days in October to clarify and verify the content of their application. For example, during four days at Henry Ford, examiners spent time at three dozen medical sites and interviewed executives and more than 1,200 employees. The Baldrige Panel of Judges used feedback from the site visits…
22Nov2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedValue of Baldrige Validated — Again
Thomson Reuters released a report this week on a study that demonstrates that “hospitals using the Baldrige process exhibit significantly higher rates of improvement in balanced organizational performance than non-Baldrige hospitals.”
The study confirms what similar studies of business performance have also shown. No matter what their organizations do, leaders need to consider these results and, if their organizations are not integrating Baldrige, ask how they, too, can achieve similar high rates of improvement.
Thomson Reuters uses independent public data to measure hospital performance and identify the national benchmarks for balanced excellence. It publishes the best 3% in an annual list of 100 Top Hospitals. For this study, it measured the association between 38 Baldrige hospitals (Award winners plus site-visit hospitals that gave permission) and 100 Top Hospitals on key indicators of performance and improvement. The analysis showed:
- Substantial agreement between the results of the Baldrige process and the Top 100 Hospitals award: Baldrige hospitals are significantly more likely than their peers to win a 100 Top Hospitals award.
- Baldrige hospitals were significantly more likely than their peers to display faster five-year performance improvement.
- Baldrige hospitals were about 83% more likely than non-Baldrige hospitals to be awarded a 100 Top Hospitals award for excellence.
- Baldrige hospitals outperformed non-Baldrige hospitals on nearly all of the individual measures of performance used in the 100 Top Hospitals composite score including risk-adjusted mortality, risk-adjusted complications index, patient safety index, CMS core measures score, severity-adjusted average…
