The 353-bed Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, Mo., has spent the past year paying homage to its state's motto with the Show You! project, aimed at improving poor community perception and patient-satisfaction scores in its emergency room.

That effort has won the hospital an honorable mention in the Process Improvement category in this year's Spirit of Excellence Awards.

From January through August 2011, the center has reduced arrival to triage times to two minutes from 10, left-without-treatment rates to 1.3% from 4.67% and average length of stay to 165 minutes from 208. Meanwhile, customer satisfaction based on Press Ganey surveys has risen from the fourth percentile in October 2010 to 42nd in January to 82nd in August.

“They had the whole group look at the flow and identified the bottlenecks,” says category judge Christina Ryan. “They looked at not only how the department was laid out but also the teams looked at how they could more efficiently get patients through.”