Sustainability: Health Care and Baldrige

“Baldrige has helped us create sustainability for the future,” writes Dr. Glenn Crotty, Jr., executive vice president and chief operating officer of Charleston Area Medical Center, part of Baldrige Award recipient Charleston Area Medical Center Health System (CAMHS). Crotty's article appears in the latest issue of Focus, a newsletter of the American College of Medical Quality (first quarter, 2016).

According to Crotty, the Baldrige Criteria, within the Baldrige Excellence Framework (Health Care), helped the four-hospital system (also includes an American College of Surgeons-certified level one trauma center and a women and children’s hospital) align all of its components to improve results.

“We have achieved top-decile performance in observed-to-expected mortality and in overall safety and quality of care. At the same time, we have decreased length of stay and achieved cost reductions of $177 million over the past 12 years,” he says.

Crotty’s article “Baldrige Performance Excellence Program…How the Criteria Helped the CAMC Health System to Become a Better Organization” highlights alignment and performance improvement at the health system, from alignment of the leadership system and competencies, to the planning process and corporate goals, to each employee’s performance and performance improvement projects.

“The CAMC Health System is a better organization today because we made the choice to use the Baldrige Criteria as a guiding framework for quality improvement,” said Crotty. “This performance improvement framework helps us to achieve our mission of ‘striving to provide the best healthcare to every patient every day.’ The Baldrige Criteria helped us become a process-driven organization focusing on results.”