Hill Country Memorial and St. David's HealthCare are among the four winners of the annual Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, a presidential honor recognizing performance excellence.
The winners are role models in innovation, management, employee and customer satisfaction, and generating results, U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said in an announcement released Wednesday.
This year's two healthcare winners are Hill Country Memorial, an 86-bed not-for-profit community hospital in Fredericksburg, Texas, and St. David's HealthCare, an Austin, Texas-based health system.
Hill Country Memorial is recognized for consistent performance on outcomes. This includes having been named three years in a row as one of Truven Health Analytics' 100 Top Hospitals, the announcement said.
Likewise, St. David's HealthCare's composite performance on core measures reported by the CMS is at, or better than, the top 10% of healthcare systems nationally for each disease group. Two of the system's hospitals also have been named to Truven's 100 Top Hospitals list multiple times: St. David's Medical Center has been on the list for five consecutive years and St. David's North Austin Medical Center has been on the list for three consecutive years.
“The criteria, which are regularly updated, help organizations reach their goals, improve results and become more competitive by aligning plans, processes, people, decisions and actions vital to achieving ongoing success,” said Robert Fangmeyer, director of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program.
The award—named to honor Malcolm Baldrige, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce from 1981 to 1987, who was a proponent of quality management as a key to U.S prosperity and strength—is the highest level of national recognition for performance excellence that a U.S. organization can receive. Congress established the program in 1987 to recognize achievements in quality and business performance, and raise awareness about the importance of quality and performance excellence in gaining a competitive edge.
An independent board of examiners recommended this year's Baldrige Award recipients from a field of 22 applicants. They were evaluated in seven areas, including leadership; strategic planning; customer focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce focus; operations focus; and results.
The awards will be presented at an April 2015 ceremony during the Quest for Excellence conference in Baltimore.
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