North Mississippi Health Services honored with Baldrige award

North Mississippi Health Services is a recipient of  the 2012 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, a presidential honor annually bestowed upon organizations in four different sectors for outperforming their industry’s status quo.

North Mississippi Health Services, a healthcare network headquartered in Tupelo, was one of four organizations selected from a pool of 39 applicants to receive the award, which is administered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. An independent board considers organizations’ leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, measurement, knowledge management, workforce focus, operations focus and results to choose recipients, according to a Nov. 14 statement.

North Mississippi Medical Center, the flagship hospital of the organization with a total of six hospitals, four nursing homes and 34 clinics serving 24 counties, previously won the award in 2006.

Some of North Mississippi Health Services’ accomplishments include:

• Meeting 26 of the Joint Commission’s 30 surgical care improvement core measures;
• Meeting the National Committee for Quality Assurance’s top-decile benchmark for outpatient management of diabetes every year since 2008; and
• Implementing the “Ideas for Excellence” program, which allows employees to submit innovative ideas for consideration and has led to more than 11,000 submission since 2011.