News and Updates

Quest for Excellence 2010 update 1

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:42:02 GMT

Baldrige Quest for Excellence days one and two are complete. A couple key observations from those two days:

No surprise that the key driver for winning organizations is a senior leader and senior leader team that is committed to performance excellence. No one on those teams is willing to settle for mediocrity in their organization's performance. Whether a large organization like Honeywell, or a small company like Midway USA, these organizations embarked on a difficult journey that has paid off in success. The journey is never easy.

Community involvement is getting to be another key driver of success - it seems to me that this area to address has moved from "being a good corporate citizen" to being a fundamental driver of success by understanding the needs of your community in a way that helps drive organizational success - especially for the hospitals that are more focused on local communities. Baldrige geeks will recognize the change in the 2009-2010 criteria in 1.2c, moving from community impact to societal impact.

A very effective practice that was described was Midway USA's efforts to bring excellence to their city. CEO Larry Potterfield is forming a Baldrige community group to inspire other organizations in their hometown, Columbia, MO, to use the Baldrige criteria to improve the economic climate of the city. Larry is VERY committed to using the Baldrige criteria...and is no doubt going to help drive change in Columbia. Imagine if every community with a Baldrige recipient (or even a committed Baldrige applicant or examiner) were able to start "interest groups" to get the ball rolling!

Harvard Business Review healthcare article

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:06:47 GMT

I recently received my April issue of Harvard Business Review. This issue has several excellent articles in a Spotlight on Fixing Health Care. My recommendation - go to the local bookstore and buy it or buy reprints from the www.hbr.com website. Note that Harvard Business Review is very picky about making copies of their articles.

Turning Doctors into Leaders
HBR article summary:
• Health care delivery is fragmented and chaotic, principally because of an explosion of knowledge and technological advances. Taming this chaos requires a new breed of leaders at every level.
• Health care's new leaders must organize doctors into teams; measure their performance not by what they do but by how their patients fare; deftly apply financial and behavioral incentives; and dismantle dysfunctional cultures.
• By organizing care delivery around patient's needs - an idea more radical than it sounds - the leaders of cutting-edge health care organizations are raising the quality, efficiency, and value of the services they provide.

This article's headings are closely aligned with the Baldrige Criteria: Articulating Vision and Values (Category 1 - Leadership), Organizing for Performance (Category 5 - Workforce Focus), Developing a Measurement System (Category 4 - Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management), Building Effective Teams (Category 5 - Workforce Focus), Improving Processes (Category 6 - Process Management) - and a great ending - Dismantling Cultural Barriers.

I encourage you to read this article with the Baldrige Core Value of Managing for Innovation in mind. The examples given describe organizations that fundamentally change the way they provide care in a manner that drives improved outcomes. They also are making changes that require the integration of physicians into the change process.

Health Care Needs a New Kind of Hero
An interview with Atul Gawande, whose book The Checklist Manifesto, talks about how the simple "checklist" tool can reduce mistakes and save lives, in addition to driving greater efficiency and teamwork. If it's intriguing, buy the book. I haven't read it yet, but it's on my "must-read" list.

Consider this simple tool as a method to help hardwire practices that will drive outcomes in your Quality pillar. Also consider in this article how physicians are integrated into teams - moving from a culture where "we celebrated cowboys, but what we need is more pit crews."

Fixing Health Care on the Front Lines
This article basically says that health care delivery is based on an old model, but with greater information available we should be changing the way care is delivered. Process must be changed to provide this type of care - consider Baldrige 6.1 - Work Systems (How do you design your work systems?) and 6.2 - Work Processes (How do you design, manage, and improve your key organizational work processes?)

HBR article summary:
• Many of the proposals for improving the quality and curbing the rising costs of health care call for radically changing either the players or the rules governing them. The approaches won't work. Regardless of what happens to reform efforts, the only realistic hope is for existing general hospitals, clinics, and physician practices to redesign themselves.
• No single organizational design will fit all, but there are common design principles. Organizations should configure themselves to excel at three tasks: applying scientifically established best practices for treating well-understood diseases, using trial and error to deal with conditions that are complicated or poorly understood, and capturing and applying learning generated by day-to-day care.

Four design principles are highlighted in the article:
1. Manage the Care - decisions, tasks, and workflows crucial to optimizing patient care must be the organization's primary focus.
2. Corral Variability - High- and low-variability care must be separated. Consider the use of checklists (above) in the low-variability care - low-variability care is why we have core measures that measure standardization of treatment.
3. Reorganize Resources - When health care delivery organizations redesign clinical processes, they must also redesign the supporting infrastructure and practices.
4. Learn from Everyday Care - structure and processes of hospitals, clinics, and practices must be designed to help organizations learn from daily work.

This article truly strikes at the heart of what Baldrige Category 6 is all about...

These three articles provide multiple examples of organizations that are doing what the articles describe. Many are larger organizations like Intermountain Healthcare, Virginia Mason, and Mayo Clinic. Smaller organizations can learn from these innovators and bring the innovations into their organizations.

Baldrige Studer Group alignment

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:34:43 GMT

Baldrige Studer Group Alignment
Core Values Partners is a business partner with the Studer Group. The Studer Group helps organizations implement prescriptive tactics and tools that drive improved outcomes.

The Baldrige Criteria asks how an organization demonstrates well-deployed, systematic processes leading to a balanced set of business results. While it is easy for a health care organization to embrace the values and the well-documented success of organizations that have effectively applied the Criteria, organizations are looking for more prescriptive advice and feedback within each category as they navigate the road to performance excellence. The Baldrige Criteria ask for systematic processes and results; the Studer Group provides many of the answers to Criteria questions with prescriptive tools to hardwire excellence. To "hardwire" means much the same thing as "systematic." These prescriptive tools have been shown to lead to improved results. Read More

Baldrige Quest for Excellence

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 07:55:48 GMT

Baldrige Quest for Excellence Conference Update

Today (April 20) was the first day of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Quest for Excellence conference in Washington, DC. The day was full of examples of innovative performance excellence practices. Click Read More for a summary of the day.
Read More

Quest for Excellence Conference April 20-22

Thu, 07 May 2009 06:14:22 GMT

Quest for Excellence, the annual conference of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for Performance, is being held in Washington, DC, on April 20-22. Paul Grizzell of Core Values Partners will be there and will be providing updates on this site. Look for summary updates of the previous day's key learnings and best practices every morning.

Ten Best Practices for Healthcare Boards

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:25:16 GMT

Ten Best Practices for Measuring the Effectiveness of Nonprofit Healthcare Boards

Two broad legal duties of a nonprofit director are loyalty and caring for the interests of the public. Previous legal challenges have seen board members use an "I know nothing" defense, which may be an indication of board members' lack of courage to ask each other tough questions about board and organization practices. Measurement of board effectiveness and continuous improvement of board performance are keys in setting organization direction, ensuring ethical and legal guidelines are followed, and assessing organizational performance.

Although geared toward non-profit boards, this article provides valuable information for any board of directors.

Read More

Is Your Organization at the top of your game

Thu, 07 May 2009 06:14:16 GMT

Is Your Organization at the Top of Its Game?

Is your organization at the top of its game? If so, maybe you're wondering how to make those incremental improvements to reach the highest level of performance excellence. Or perhaps your organization's performance is just mediocre and leaders are looking for a method to accelerate improvement efforts. Maybe performance is even poor, and you need a way to focus your turnaround efforts.

Click here to read the entire article

News and Updates

Thu, 07 May 2009 06:13:59 GMT