You shouldn’t have to choose between quality healthcare and a great patient experience. And now you don’t have to. Hospitals and Healthcare Systems that have successfully used the Healthcare version of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence provide a good or better quality of care and outcomes of care while at the same time providing a better patient experience than their competitors. While some have suggested that you have to make “trade-offs” and give up “quality of care” to improve patient experience and satisfaction, it turns out that is simply not true. Take a holistic, systems-thinking approach to designing and improving the care processes and the patient experience as an integrated system. You can have both, as the Baldrige Award recipients in this study demonstrate.
Abstract
Hospitals today face pressures from various stakeholders to improve performance across a comprehensive scorecard, which has become the basis for value-based purchasing and reimbursement. This study investigates relationships between the effective application of the Malcolm Baldrige Health Care version of the Criteria for Performance Excellence (HCPE) and healthcare organizational performance. There have been many studies on the value of implementing the Criteria for Performance Excellence, but due to the lack of comparable contexts and common performance measures, analysis of the differences in performance between Baldrige Award recipients and nonrecipients has been limited. This study focuses on the common context of healthcare organizations in the same geographic region and common metrics to analyze the impact of effective HCPE applications. This study compares 34 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Health Care recipients (2002-2011) to 153 competitors in their geographic markets using standard Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) performance measures to determine if there is a relationship between the effective use of the HCPE as an organizational excellence framework and the performance of healthcare organizations. Three categories of performance were explored, including the process of care (23 measures), patient experience using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey (10 measures), and outcome of care (six measures). Process of care and patient experience data included performance from October 2009 through September 2010, and the outcomes of care measures covered performance from July 2007 through June 2010. While there was no significant difference in the process of care results or outcomes between Baldrige recipients and their competitors, there was a significant difference in patient experience results. The most important finding in this study was that Baldrige recipients provided care equal to or better than competitors while at the same time providing a better patient experience. These results add to the growing evidence that the HCPE criteria are a valid framework to align organizational design, strategy, systems, and human capital to create long-term effectiveness in an institutionalized high-performance culture.
Schulingkamp, R. C. & Latham, J. R. (2015) Healthcare Performance Excellence: A Comparison of Baldrige Award Recipients and Competitors, Quality Management Journal (22) 3
Publicity
Baldrige Helps Health Care Organizations Provide Superior Patient Experience | NIST Tech Beat | July 23, 2015 | Read Article
Baldrige Award-winning hospitals provide higher quality care, study finds | by Heather Punke | Becker’s Healthcare | July 27, 2015 | Read Article
John Latham 