Running the Business, Health Care Style

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

With financial results comparing favorably to the Standard & Poor's "A-"-rated benchmark, Schneck Medical Center, a 2011 winner of the Malcom Baldrige National Quality Award, proves that controlling the costs of its work systems can align with its commitment to excellence through its Patient First Culture, an initiative that has resulted in numerous advances in clinical outcomes, patient safety enhancements, and organizational and customer service improvements.

The 93-bed nonprofit hospital providing primary and specialized services to the residents of Jackson County, Indiana, uses the Criteria for Performance Excellence to guide growth results in its strategic focus areas—women’s health, joint replacement, noninvasive cardiac care, cancer care, and bariatric surgery. And it has consistently demonstrated high levels of patient care performance: on 17 of 22 core measures reported for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Schneck scored 100 percent in the second quarter of 2011.

In addition, patient satisfaction surveys reflect Schneck’s year-to-year favorable performance, meeting or exceeding top 10 percent or top 25 percent levels on nine of ten Press Ganey (a national consulting firm focused on improving health care performance) measures, including inpatient quality of care, inpatient family support, inpatient coordination of care, and inpatient customer service.

“Schneck first implemented the Baldrige framework four years ago to accelerate and prioritize our performance excellence journey,” says Gary A. Meyer, President/CEO of Schneck Medical Center. “The Baldrige Criteria and our unwavering commitment to quality, satisfaction, and continuous improvement have helped us toward our vision to be an organization of excellence, every person, every time.”

Schneck controls the costs of its work systems through daily and monthly monitoring, as well as annual reviews of performance measures in alignment with the fiscal and operations pillar in its “Run the Business” approach. This approach has resulted in an improved bond rating and improved operating margin, both of which had decreased during the 2009 national economic downturn.

You can learn more about this running-the-business approach, as well as about other best practices from Baldrige Award recipients, at the 24th Annual Quest for Excellence conference.

How can learning about this award-winning approach help your organization?