All Posts Tagged With: "hospitals"
To Improve Hospital Care, Improve the Board
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…
11Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedStrategic Challenges for Hospitals
According to an annual survey by the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE), 77% of the approximately 1,100 hospital CEOs who responded identified financial challenges as one of the top three issues confronting their hospitals. Patient safety and quality ranked second according to 43% of respondents, while care for the uninsured was third at 41%.
When asked what specific concerns faced their hospitals in the area of patient safety and quality, redesigning care processes and redesigning the work environment to reduce errors both received 66%, compliance with accrediting organizations got 60%, and medication errors was identified by 57% of respondents.
These strategic challenges help explain why healthcare organizations now account for roughly half of all Baldrige applications despite being one of six categories: Financial challenges, which are exacerbated by caring for the uninsured, are forcing hospitals to be as efficient as possible while still providing safe, high-quality patient care. The Baldrige model helps hospitals address all of these challenges by understanding how their management systems work, where their greatest opportunities for improvement are, and how they can make dramatic improvements quickly.
The nine hospitals and medical centers that have received the Baldrige Award demonstrate how to tackle all of these challenges at the same…
23Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
