All Posts Tagged With: "Healthcare"
Catholic Healthcare Systems Excel
According to a Thomson Reuters study conducted for Modern Healthcare, Catholic-owned healthcare systems perform significantly better than investor-owned, for-profit systems.
The study used federally reported core quality measures along with inpatient mortality and complications rates, an inpatient safety index, 30-day mortality and readmission rates, average length of stay, and patients’ perceptions of care. A composite score across all of these measures was computed for 255 systems. The 36 Catholic systems had an average rank of 84 (lower is better), while “other church” systems came in at 121, secular not-for-profit systems scored 129, and investor-owned systems were at 182.
Eleven healthcare systems have won the Baldrige Award and all are not-for-profit. The first healthcare system to receive the Award, SSM, is a large Catholic system with 15 hospitals and two nursing homes in four states.
According to Jean Chenoweth at Thomson Reuters, “health systems owned by the Catholic Church may be the most active in setting and monitoring achievement of quality goals as well as aligning the management of hospitals within a system in achieving what they see as a mission.” That’s a good description of all 11 Baldrige healthcare winners.
You can read more about these winners by clicking on their profiles, which are two-page summaries of their organizations, or their award application summaries, which are their complete responses to the Baldrige Criteria questions:
- AtlantiCare (2009):…
The Organization You Want
What information do you need to build the organization you want?
We’ve been answering that question now for one year with nearly 370 articles on all aspects of a world-class management system. Our guide for what to address is the Baldrige model defined by the Baldrige Criteria and used to determine Baldrige Award winners. No other management model in the world has been as thoroughly tested, refined, and deployed.
The goal of any management system is to produce the results you want your organization to achieve. Ideally, those results align with your organization’s mission and vision. In world-class organizations, results are multi-dimensional and not just profits for a business or test results for a school. The Baldrige Criteria identify six areas where excellent results are necessary for long-term success.
The rest of the Baldrige Criteria address the development and deployment of the systematic processes needed to achieve world-class results. The Baldrige model is a process model: It asks how you do what you do more than 130 times.
Process has four dimensions:
- The approach you use to get something done
- Consistent deployment of the approach to all relevant areas of the organization
- Refining the approach through cycles of learning
- The integration of your approach with the rest of your management system
Questions about your processes are organized in six Categories: leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, measurement, workforce focus, and process management. Everything…
12Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedVictory for Quality
On Wednesday, President Obama appointed Dr. Don Berwick to run Medicare and Medicaid. Just to summarize Berwick’s credentials, he’s a pediatrician, clinical professor at the Harvard Medical School, former leader and advisor on a number of government councils and task forces aimed at improving the quality of healthcare, and a former Baldrige Judge.
I wrote about Berwick’s nomination on April 19th, pointing out that the immediate past president of the American Medical Association said that he “is widely known and well respected for his visionary efforts that focus on optimizing the quality and safety of patient care.” According to USA Today, his “nomination was immediately hailed as a brilliant choice by policy experts from across the ideological spectrum.”
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid have not had a permanent administrator since October 2006. Obama nominated the perfect person to fix this problem while addressing a much bigger one: how to deliver high-quality patient care for less. Berwick’s Baldrige and healthcare background provide an unusual systems perspective for tackling an issue that is critical to the country and to all Americans.
Kudos to Obama for finding the right person and for making the recess appointment that puts him to work.
For those keeping score of Baldrige people in high positions, we now have Berwick at Medicare and Medicaid; Terry Holliday, former superintendent of Baldrige Award-winning…
8Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA Healthcare Innovator
The Henry Ford Health System built its first new hospital since 1915 a couple years ago in West Bloomfield, 30 minutes from downtown Detroit. According to William C. Taylor, the hospital “truly must be seen to be believed.” (“One Hospital’s Radical Prescription for Change,” HBR, June 2, 2010)
Here are a few things that made Taylor a believer:
- The hospital sits on a wooded 160-acre campus
- All 300 rooms are private and designed so that family members can stay overnight if they wish
- All patients go right to pre-assigned rooms when they arrive
- A concierge helps patients and families with errands
- A “tea sommelier” recommends different teas for different situations
- There’s a day spa and an indoor farmer’s market every Wednesday
- There’s a 90-seat demonstration kitchen to teach patients’ families and the community how to prepare better food
- A celebrity chef spent two years creating 3,000 healthy recipes for patients to choose from
- The atrium features more than 2,000 trees lining paths to shops that sell products that can improve health
There’s a Baldrige connection to this story: West Bloomfield’s new CEO is Gerard van Grinsven, who joined Henry Ford after a long career with two-time Baldrige Award winner Ritz-Carlton. Skeptics questioned the wisdom of hiring someone with no healthcare experience to run the new hospital. Van Grinsven thinks it was a smart move. “I had a fresh pair of eyes and…
3Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued83 Vie for 2010 Baldrige Award
The Baldrige program reported yesterday that 83 organizations have applied for the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The breakdown of applicant categories is 54 in health care, 10 in education, 7 in nonprofit/government, 7 small businesses, 3 manufacturers, and 2 service companies.
As the graph shows, last year the health care category accounted for 60% of all applicants. This year it represents 65%. While health care is embracing the Baldrige model, businesses are snubbing it: Only 14.5% of the applicants came from the three business categories, down from 15.7% last year. The Baldrige program came into existence to make American businesses more competitive. While it got business leaders’ attention during its first decade, it has fallen off their radars over the last ten years. It’s hard to imagine the Baldrige program could have survived if it had not added the health care category.
So what will it take to get business leaders to consider the Baldrige model? Or is the program’s inability to market its product too complete to overcome?
To read more about the Baldrige Award, click on these articles:
- What Is Baldrige?
- How the Baldrige Award Works
- Baldrige 101
- How to Integrate Baldrige
- Baldrige Gets Results
- A Baldrige Leader
- Summaries of 2009 Baldrige Award Winning Applications
Changing County Processes
What happens when a new county executive initiates radical change? Exactly what you would expect.
Jeffrey Smith came to Santa Clara County to help close a $230 million deficit. He implemented hoshin kanri (policy deployment), which some moronic union official described as “some airy-fairy thing.” Many of the people responsible for doing the planning ignored him and a number of department heads submitted budgets the old way, according to a story on MercuryNews.com (“Santa Clara County new executive’s strategy has fans, skeptics,” Julia Prodis Sulek, May 14, 2010).
Smith has taken a county hospital from the threat of losing $300 million in funding because of a pattern of violence to a national award for patient safety. He’s a former doctor, lawyer, and hospital administrator and he understands that the same old, same old just won’t work anymore.
“We can no longer rely on old processes and procedures,” he says. “My job is to enable the organization to make the dramatic changes, which will be difficult.”
Hoshin kanri, popularized by Toyota, helps an organization focus on a shared vision and goals and involves people in developing strategic and action plans to achieve those goals. I worked with Zytec in 1991 when it won the Baldrige Award and one of the reasons it won was its robust hoshin kanri process.
One of Smith’s responsibilities is the county’s Valley…
25May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Unheralded Quality Side of Healthcare Reform
The May issue of Quality Progress has an interesting article on provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka, the healthcare reform bill recently passed by Congress and signed into law) aimed at improving quality of care, the delivery of care, and patient safety. (“Quality Key Ingredient in Healthcare Reform,” Mark Edmund)
Lost in the hubbub generated by partisan attempts to denigrate the act is well-deserved praise for the following provisions:
- Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, an independent body that will conduct research and communicate results on the risks and benefits of marketed drugs, devices, and medical products, including the most effective options.
- Trauma center program will fund research on emergency medicine.
- Workforce advisory committee will determine what steps to take to respond to and avoid doctor and nurse shortages.
- The Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety will research and share information about improving the quality and safety of healthcare.
- Wellness programs funded by grants to small businesses that establish them.
- Innovation center within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will focus on reducing program costs while maintaining or improving quality of care. (And by the way, wouldn’t President Obama’s nominee to lead this organization, Dr. Donald Berwick, be ideally suited for the job?)
- Collaborative Care Network Program aimed at coordinating and integrating healthcare services for uninsured or underinsured people.
- Quality metrics and measures for reporting and reimbursing for federal health programs.
- Bundled payments, to…
