Hospitals are the focal point for our healthcare system, and it has never been more important for them to be in better health. But how do we achieve the levels of performance and the quality of care necessary to manage the difficult challenges of today while meeting patients' ever-growing needs?
I've spent much of my career developing strategies to improve patient safety, and educating providers and policy makers on the ways technology increases the quality of care. I think we have an obligation, as providers, to deliver the best care possible to our patients. One critical way to do that is to learn from the innovations of others.
McKesson sponsors the annual American Hospital Association-McKesson Quest for Quality Award as a way of recognizing hospitals that are leaders in developing a safer, higher quality, and more cost-effective approach to care. The aim is to draw attention to these organizations and showcase their best practices so that others in the field can adopt approaches that work while still making their own important advancements and improvements.
The award was developed 10 years ago, and is based on the six quality aims of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) first articulated in IOM's 2001 groundbreaking report, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century. Over these ten years, the organizations that have been selected as finalists and winners have done remarkable work in each of the six quality areas, as well as in integrating those efforts across their organizations.
The IOM's criteria are:
- Safe: Quality hospitals closely examine the injuries and illnesses that can occur to patients through the care that is supposed to help them. They determine the causes and put plans into place to prevent what is preventable.
- Effective: Effective care is scientifically-based, provided appropriately to those patients who will benefit, and assessed in terms of clinical outcomes.
- Patient Centered: Traditionally, as providers, we look at how to reengineer processes to meet the needs of doctors and nurses. Patient-centered care turns that model on its head by designing processes that are centered around the needs of the patient and his or her family.
- Timely: Being timely means reducing the delays experienced by both patients and providers. This requires looking closely at how processes support the ability to deliver care.
- Efficient: When hospitals are efficient, they avoid wasting equipment and supplies, as well as time, ideas, and energy.
- Equitable: Equitable care means treating all people and patient the same, regardless of community or ethnicity. This requires understanding the needs of each community, and how care can be delivered to them. The success of that can only be measured in terms of outcomes.
This year, five hospitals were recognized for their innovation in quality and safety. The winner of the Quest for Quality Award, Memorial Regional Hospital of South Florida, was particularly striking in terms of the commitment of its Board and CEO to delivering on improvements across the six aims. It was clear that such leadership set the tone for the entire organization.
I believe there is great value in organizing a hospital's improvement efforts around these six aims. Doing so requires really examining processes to develop or adopt the best approach possible. This work also improves the organizational and financial health of the hospital. In fact, a healthy bottom line and an efficient system don't mean we're cutting corners or making decisions at the expense of quality care. It means we're applying the right resources in the right way to provide patients with better care.
Mary Beth Navarra-Sirio, vice president and patient safety officer at McKesson was recently interviewed by Health Talk Radio about the AHA-McKesson Quest for Quality prize. To learn more, listen to podcast here.

A Perspective by David Henricksen, The numbers are dropping even as the need is growing. By 2015, according to some estimates, there will be a net decrease in the number of primary care physicians practicing in the United States. Over the next decade, as older physicians retire and more medical school graduates choose specialty care, the shortage will be in the tens of thousands.