Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey
When Rulon Stacey, President and Chief Executive Officer of Poudre Valley Health System, a 2008 Baldrige Award recipient, claimed that the Health Care Criteria helped the organization save lives, I believe I heard an audible gasp throughout the auditorium where he was accepting the Award. Or maybe it was just me gasping.
As a former newspaper reporter, I knew that such a statement could not be made without data to back it up. I needed to further investigate. Here is what I found:
- Poudre Valley Health System is a locally owned and private, nonprofit health care organization serving residents of northern Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. In two acute care hospitals and a network of other facilities, Poudre Valley Health System offers a full spectrum of health care services, including emergency/urgent, intensive, medical/surgical, maternal/child, oncology, and orthopedic care.
- The health system reports that its mortality rate for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) patients has consistently improved and remained better than its primary competitor. Poudre Valley Health System also consistently outperforms the risk-adjusted rate predicted for it by HealthGrades. At the time it received the Award, the health system had seen three years of continued improvements for patients with heart failure and pneumonia.
- In 2007 and 2008, Poudre Valley Health System was recognized as the nation’s number one hospital for sustained nursing excellence by the American Nurses Association and the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI).
- At the time it received the Baldrige Award, for five consecutive years, Poudre Valley Health System had been one of seven U.S. hospitals to be named a Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospital (for superior outcomes, patient safety, and operational and financial performance).
- In addition, patient satisfaction scores surpass the national top 10 percent, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“We’ve got lessons learned that are saving people's lives because we participated in the Baldrige process," Stacey said.
Based on these data, Mr. Stacey, I believe that you are correct—utilizing the Health Care Criteria to drive improvement does help save lives.
(To learn more about the processes that Poudre Valley uses to save lives and the results it has achieved, see its Award application summary.)
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