Baldrige Award goes to two healthcare organizations

U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker has named four U.S. organizations as the 2015 recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest Presidential honor for performance excellence.

The honorees are recognized for their outstanding commitment to sustainable excellence through innovation, improvement and visionary leadership. One of this year’s recipients is from the healthcare sector (Charleston Area Medical Center Health System) and another, Mid-America Transplant Services, is from the nonprofit sector.

For the past two years, the Charleston Area Medical Center Health System has ranked in the top 5 percent for quality inpatient service by Healthgrades, a national service that rates the performance of physicians, hospitals and healthcare providers, and received the group’s Distinguished Hospital Award.

In 2001, Mid-America Transplant Services built the nation’s first stand-alone organ recovery facility, a system that has significantly reduced the expense of procuring organs compared to the cost of in-hospital organ procurement. Since 2012, the cost-per-donor for in-house cases has decreased from approximately $7,000 to under $4,000, compared to approximately $20,000 when completed in the hospital.

The Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) manages the Baldrige Award in cooperation with the private sector. An independent board of examiners recommended this year’s Baldrige Award recipients from a field of 26 applicants after evaluating them in seven areas defined by the Baldrige Criteria: leadership; strategy; customers; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce; operations; and results. An organization may compete for the award in one of six categories: manufacturing, service, small business, health care, education and nonprofit (including government agencies).

The Baldrige judges also may recognize best practices in one or more of the Baldrige Criteria categories by organizations that are candidates for the award but are not selected as a recipient. This year, the judges have chosen to honor Memorial Hermann Sugar Land Hospital (Sugar Land, Texas) for its best practices in the strategy criterion.

The 2015 Baldrige Award will be presented at an April 2016 ceremony during the Quest for Excellence conference in Baltimore.

The Baldrige Award was established by Congress in 1987 and is not given for specific products or services. Since the first group was recognized in 1988, 109 awards have been presented to 102 organizations (including seven repeat recipients).