News and Updates

Badrige Award Program Sponsor

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:12 GMT

Core Values Partners Sponsors Baldrige Quest for Excellence Conference
Core Values Partners, Inc., is proud to announce their participation as a sponsor of the Baldrige National Performance Excellence Program's "Quest for Excellence" conference in Washington, DC, on April 16-18. This demonstration of support and commitment to performance excellence exemplifies Core Values Partners' mission of "helping organizations focus, align, and accelerate their performance improvement efforts through effective use of the Baldrige Criteria." The Baldrige National Quality Award is the highest level of performance excellence recognition for US organizations.

Baldrige Performance Excellence Program funding

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:12 GMT

Foundation Board Approves Baldrige Performance Excellence Program Funding Through 2015

Consistent with its purpose, the Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, Inc. voted last week to commit funds to sustain the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program (BPEP) through fiscal year 2015. The funding is further evidence of the foundation’s commitment to the long-term viability of Baldrige. The foundation stipulated that the use of the funds is for the furtherance of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and BPEP. The foundation will review the gift annually to determine any appropriate adjustments for a rolling three-year period.

Foundation Chair Debbie J. Collard said the foundation’s support is due in part to its confidence in the ongoing development of the business and financial model by the Baldrige Enterprise, which includes BPEP, the foundation, the Alliance for Performance Excellence, and ASQ. BPEP will use the funding in conjunction with revenues raised through a variety of fee-based product and service offerings to ensure both its and the Enterprise’s sustainability.

2011 Baldrige Award Recipients

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:12 GMT

Four 2011 Baldrige Award Recipients Announced
U.S. Commerce Secretary John Bryson today named four organizations-three health care operations and one nonprofit business-as recipients of the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation's highest Presidential honor for performance excellence through innovation, improvement and visionary leadership. This marks the first year that three health care organizations have been selected at one time.

The 2011 Baldrige Award recipients-listed with their category-are:
1. Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, MO (nonprofit)
2. Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, MI (health care)
3. Schneck Medical Center, Seymour, IN (health care)
4. Southcentral Foundation, Anchorage, AK (health care)

"With innovative practices, an unwavering commitment to excellence, dynamic management and proven results, the four organizations recognized today with the 2011 Baldrige Award will serve as role models-not only for their peers in the health care, nonprofit and business sectors-but for every American organization that strives for a higher standard of performance and never settles for second-best," said Commerce Secretary John Bryson.

The 2011 Baldrige Award recipients were selected from a field of 69 applicants. All of the applicants were evaluated rigorously by an independent board of examiners in seven areas defined by the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence: leadership; strategic planning; customer focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce focus; operations focus; and results. The evaluation process for each of the recipients included about 1,000 hours of review and an on-site visit by a team of examiners to clarify questions and verify information in the applications.

Baldrige recipients 2010

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:12 GMT

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke has named seven organizations as recipients of the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation's highest presidential honor for performance excellence through innovation, improvement and visionary leadership. This marks the first year that three small businesses have been selected at one time and only the second instance in the award's 23-year history that a total of seven organizations are being honored. Recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for 2010 and their application sector are:

    Healthcare: Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, Downers Grove, IL
    Manufacturing: MEDRAD, Warrendale, PA
    Manufacturing: Nestle Purina PetCare Co. , St. Louis, MO
    Small Business: Studer Group, Gulf Breeze, FL
    Small Business: K&N Management, Austin, TX
    Small Business: Freese and Nichols, Inc., Fort Worth, TX
    Education: Montgomery County Public Schools, Rockville, MD

Congratulations to these recipients for demonstrating role model performance excellence.

Ethics training

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:12 GMT

The Baldrige criteria requires senior leaders to ensure legal and ethical behavior. However, many organizations aren't quite sure how this can be done - they just trust their employees to do the right thing. An example of ethics training is provided in the following article.

Harvard Business Review healthcare article

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:12 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

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:11 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

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:11 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

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:11 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

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:11 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

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:11 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

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:06:10 GMT