Posted by Christine Schaefer  Around this time last year, we highlighted on Blogrige how MESA doubled its revenue after winning its first Baldrige Award in 2006. The Tulsa, Oklahoma-based small business also more than doubled in size between 2006 and 2012, when it won its second Baldrige Award. As it transformed from a manufacturer to a full-service provider of corrosion control and integrity solutions to the pipeline industry, MESA added 5 locations and 140 workforce members, while growing annual revenues from $16 million to $100 million from 2002 to 2013. At the Baldrige Program’s upcoming Quest for Excellence® Conference, Kelsey May, general counsel at MESA, will share best practices behind this story of phenomenal business growth, with a focus on how MESA has used the Baldrige framework to support its strategy for "responsible growth." In the meantime, she shared the following information in a recent interview. How does MESA’s growth strategy relate to the focus on excellence? MESA is a big believer that the only sustainable method for getting bigger is by getting better. If we continuously improve in all of our six strategic objectives, we’ll continue to be a world-class organization; if we continue to be a world-class organization, we’ll add and keep customers based on what we can do for them. Our six strategic objectives (which rarely change) are outlined in our annual strategic plan, along with assigned action items to drive those objectives forward. Courtesy of MESA What do you see as the key benefit for small businesses like yours of using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence as a management framework? The benefit to using the Baldrige framework is that organizations can tailor the Criteria to suit their needs and their time frame. For example, if your organization is overwhelmed by the idea of "quality management" or the phrase "performance excellence," start with just one area and try to focus on small improvements that will, over time, add up to organizational change. We all have to start somewhere, and there’s no bad place to start—as long as you just start. What are your top tips for organizations beginning to use the Baldrige framework? ·         Communicate: Make sure you have the support of senior leadership and employees. Instigating organizational change is not a one-person challenge, and the only way to truly sustain change and excellence is if everyone is on the same page. ·         Share/steal: The Baldrige community is so generous and open; take advantage of conferences and best-practice sessions. If you’re struggling in a certain area, it’s likely that other organizations have been down the same path and come out on the other side. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel when so many great leaders and organizations are eager to share their stories with you. ·         Keep going: It’s a journey, and one that will take you longer than you might expect. The Baldrige framework is not about an award or a temporary fix. It’s about lasting, continuous improvement and a systematic framework for excellence. You will never "master" the Criteria. Instead, you can use it every year, every month, every day, to ensure that your organization is striving for excellence in every aspect. What’s next in MESA’s Baldrige journey? MESA’s journey within the Criteria, just like our pursuit of excellence, will never end. We still refer to our 2012 feedback report to address the opportunities for improvement (OFIs) that were identified. Although we were lucky enough to receive the award, we were not without our OFIs, and most organizations cannot effectively address every OFI within a single year. So we prioritize those when creating our Strategic Plan and we address the most important. And next year, we’ll do that again, and we’ll do it the year after that. There will always be areas for improvement, but as long as we’re staying on top of them year after year, we’ll continue to be the best organization we can be. To learn more, attend MESA’s presentation, "Using Baldrige for Responsible Business Growth," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference in Baltimore, Marylandon Tuesday, April 8. 

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Listening to customers. It’s something that any good organization knows that it needs to do to stay in business. But what are some tips for providing customers with feedback opportunities, for using technology to listen, and for diversifying how you listen? Now layer this question on the interesting listening opportunities for Southcentral Foundation, a 2011 Baldrige Award recipient, whose  system is owned, managed, directed, designed, and driven by Alaska Native people who are referred to as its "customer-owners." In addition, Southcentral’s total coverage area spans some 100,000 square miles, with about one-fifth of the population living in 55 remote villages accessible only by plane. Crystal Lewis, Southcentral improvement specialist, will be speaking on this topic at the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence® Conference. I asked her and her colleagues about their listening strategies. What are three ways that a health care organization might listen to its customer-owners/customers? By having a shared relationship between the customer-owner and organization By providing customer-owners with feedback opportunities before their visit, after their visit, and even after hours By having more than one way to listen to customers-owners, for example, utilizing technology to improve how we listen What are three things that Southcentral Foundation has learned through listening? Culture and traditions have an influence on health and wellness. Success of the health care system is a shared responsibility. Customer-owners want to be participants of their own health care. What else might folks learn from your session? How customer-owner feedback continually impacts the health care system through the strategic planning cycle Examples of how Southcentral Foundation has used technology to increase response rates and how to turn that data into action To learn more, attend Southcentral Foundation’s special presentation, "Listening to Customer-Owners and Customer Satisfaction," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Posted by Christine Schaefer The student demographic profile of Jenks Public Schools has significantly changed since the Oklahoma district became a Baldrige Award winner in 2005. The pace and variety of population shifts that Jenks has experienced may resemble those in your own school system’s environment, whether you live in the same region or a southern, northern, eastern, or western U.S. state today. Since 2005, Jenks’s enrollment of prekindergarten through grade 12 students has grown from 9,400 to 11,173. The ethnic mix of that student body has shifted as the numbers of Hispanic, American Indian, African American, and Asian students have each increased by 5% or more, while the proportion of Caucasian students has shrunk from 90% to 66%, from 1990 to 2013. Courtesy of Jenks Public Schools What evidently has not changed at Jenks, according to Lisa Muller, the district’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, is the district’s commitment to improvement and excellence. Muller outlined two key ways in which Jenks’s continued use of the Baldrige Criteria has driven performance improvement over the past nine years. First, she said, "We have refined our Continuous Improvement Model to include the district’s core competencies, an idea which was not around in the Criteria in 2005." Second, she said, "We have developed a school culture framework that reflects the way in which the district seeks to create a positive school culture through the coupling of best practices with strategic thinking and planning," she added. "When combined with our key processes, this framework captures the district’s understanding of who we are as an organization." At the Baldrige Program’s upcoming Quest for Excellence® Conference, Muller will share guidance on a foundational step in a Baldrige self-assessment: getting started with writing an Organizational Profile. Jenks has used the tool—an essential part of the Baldrige framework—for both self-assessment and for completing the Criteria-based application for the Baldrige Award. Muller and others in her organization see the value of the Organizational Profile as follows:  ·         It encourages valuable conversation about the organization’s identity. ·         It provides opportunities to discuss the organization’s strategic situation. ·         It creates a snapshot in time of the organization, how it operates, and the challenges it faces. ·         It introduces the idea of core competencies. In a recent interview, Muller also shared why Jenks has found it worth the investment of time and other resources to conduct a full self-assessment using the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence. "Jenks Public Schools chose to use the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence because they provide nationally and internationally recognized standards by which to measure organizational performance," she said. "The Criteria not only provided a means of assessing our continuous improvement work in the district during the early stages of our journey but also continue to stretch us as the Criteria themselves improve and change over the years." "While some additional time and resources are required to ‘do Baldrige,’" she added, "we try as much as possible to weave our continuous improvement processes in to the way we do our work and conduct business, rather than viewing organizational improvement as a stand-alone initiative." In addition, she explained that employees from across the district who work in many different roles are involved annually on teams that conduct a thorough review of one Baldrige Criteria category each year. For organizations getting started with Baldrige, Muller offered the following tips based on Jenks’s experience: 1.       Organizations in the earliest stages of the continuous improvement journey will likely find the "Are We Making Progress?" surveys valuable as a starting point. These surveys—one for the senior leadership team and another for other employees (available for free download from the Baldrige Web site via this link)—are based on the Organizational Profile questions in the Baldrige Criteria. 2.      Once the survey results are in, pull together a cross-functional team to analyze the results and discuss potential answers to the questions from the Organizational Profile. 3.      Conduct a gap analysis based on this work; it will likely provide several "jumping off points" for continuous improvement efforts in the organization. To learn more, attend the school district’s presentation, "How to Get Started on Your Organizational Profile," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland on Tuesday, April 8.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey How do you deploy learning from the voice of your customers, plus company strategy, to workforce members in every room in the company, every factory floor, every customer service center, both domestic and abroad? That’s one of the questions that Ken Dean, vice president/director Quality Systems, Customer Development Group, for Nestlé Purina PetCare Company, a 2010 Baldrige Award recipient, will be exploring at the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence® Conference. I recently had the pleasure of a conversation with Ken to learn more about the context of Nestlé Purina’s voice of the customer strategies and how a division of the largest food company in the world uses tools to ensure that the voice of the customer is gathered, shared, and integrated into company processes. Twenty years ago, Nestlé Purina went through a massive reinvention process companywide. Part of the reinvention was to explore how the company translated its challenges into a future direction that was both customer and process focused, moving away from a direction that was overly function focused. That led to today’s strategy, which gets revised every year for both the long and short terms, to focus continuous improvement activities on customer requirements. This focus ensures that every employee understands what are those customer requirements and how they relate to them and what they do. From this reinvention process and new strategy, the organization made some discoveries: Continuous improvement, Lean, or any other improvement strategy can’t be an add-on to current operations or a "bolt-on accessory." Improvement needs to be integrated with your culture and how you do business. Any strategy requires that you build ownership among the workforce. This means that you have to get people’s buy-in, but understand that some things are non-negotiable, such as safety, health, morals, and ethics. Work on a "demand-pull" approach of people wanting your products, rather than a "supply-push" approach. Efficient measures are noble, but you can wind up with lousy measures. Instead, try for effective measures that are focused, do what they are supposed to do, and are not overburdened with too many different purposes. In addition to more discoveries, part of the presentation will be to present the context for the origination and use of tools that the organization uses to deploy strategy and voice of the customer across the company. To learn more, attend Nestlé Purina PetCare Company’s special presentation, "Operational Excellence Begins with the Customer Voice. . . .," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Posted by Christine Schaefer When Studer Group® won the Baldrige Award in 2010, the Florida-based consulting firm was noted for leveraging its customer-focused culture to achieve high satisfaction among the health care organizations it coaches in service excellence. In addition to exemplary customer satisfaction results, the small business had been named among the "Top 25 Best Small Companies to Work for in America" by the Society for Human Resource Management and the Great Places to Work Institute for three years in a row. Today Studer Group touts employee engagement results in the 99th percentile for nine consecutive years and recognition as one of the "best small companies to work for in America" for six consecutive years (among the top ten for three of those years). The organization continues to use the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence to sustain the culture of service excellence that it teaches to other organizations. At the Baldrige Program’s upcoming Quest for Excellence® Conference, Craig Deao, a member of Studer Group’s senior executive team, will present on how to change an organization’s culture to support excellence. In the following interview, he shares additional information on the Studer Group’s Baldrige journey and insights that other organizations can use. Why is the Baldrige framework useful to service organizations like yours—as well as the health care sector you serve? Since our founding, we have been in pursuit of excellence. As an organization that coaches others on their own journeys to excellence, we believe we must lead with authenticity and be our own best client. As our founder Quint Studer has often said, you can’t take anyone farther than you’ve taken yourself. Assessing our processes, systems, and results against the Baldrige Criteria and Baldrige-worthy organizations continually sharpens our saw. We have found that the Baldrige framework, a nonprescriptive set of criteria, is a perfect complement to our Evidence-Based LeadershipSM framework and the three elements to execution (shown below). Courtesy of Studer Group Our prescriptive leadership operating system aligns goals, behaviors, and systematic processes, serving as an enterprise-wide execution framework. Our framework aligns with the Baldrige framework, resulting in a natural fit for our team. How can an organization use Baldrige-based practices to change its culture? The history of successful organizational improvement journeys proves the need for organizational alignment, from the board to the front line. We believe these three key accelerants to alignment are vital prior to starting successful partnerships: (1) highest-ranking officers who are personally committed to steering the journey, (2) senior executives who hold leaders accountable for metric-based performance outcomes through a performance management and evaluation system, and (3) senior teams who provide their leaders with the skills needed to maximize their own potential by providing mandatory, quarterly leadership training. Through work over more than a decade, we have found that failure to address chronically low-performing members of the team can negatively impact the culture of the organization. Just as damaging is losing high-performing individuals because we’ve failed to reward their successes, and missing out on the opportunity to maximize the potential of the lifeblood of the organization: the solid performers who need mentoring and coaching. A key work process for high-performing organizations includes a consistently practiced, fair, documented, and objective series of discussions with high, solid, and low performers to sustain the momentum for the arduous journey of cultural transformation. This [Baldrige] Criteria give organizations the gift of balance. Too often organizations look toward a specific process improvement methodology as the answer to large-scale organizational improvement, missing the vital roles served by clear alignment of goals, development of leaders, and proven evidence that supports the necessary actions that drive improvement. We frequently hear from smart and passionate yet discouraged leaders who are frustrated by the failure of yet another process improvement effort: one that worked great at first but then regressed a few weeks later. A client CEO, Perry Mustian of Archbold Medical Center in Thomasville, GA, calls this the "pop fizzle." Tell us about Studer Group’s Baldrige journey today. It was truly an honor to receive the Baldrige Award in 2010. Today, Studer Group is just as actively on the journey as we were four years ago. We have made an organizational commitment to reapply for the award when next eligible; until then, we will continue to hone our skills and look for opportunities to get better. To learn more, attend the organization’s presentation, "How to Change the Culture of an Organization," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland on Tuesday, April 8.   

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey In health care settings, clinical integration is a fairly new concept that means the coordination of patient care across conditions, providers, settings, and time in order to achieve care that is safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and patient-focused. According to Becker’s Hospital Review, "clinical integration [between hospitals and between hospitals and physicians] offers both parties the opportunity to coordinate patient interventions, manage quality across the continuum of care, move toward population health management, and pursue true value-based contracting." For 2011 Baldrige Award recipient Schneck Medical Center, clinical integration is a concept to embrace for the good of its communities. And partnering with a competitor—a strategy that may sound foreign in some business sectors—is allowing the 93-bed nonprofit hospital to make the very best care of its patients its utmost priority. Schneck Medical Center and its partner hospital plan to contribute multiple resources, including finances and manpower, to coordinate patient care between the two hospitals and members of both medical staffs, said Tammy Dye, vice president clinical services, chief quality officer. This will include the treatment for acute episodes of illness, the treatment and management of chronic conditions, and a focus on wellness. Schneck’s Suki Wright, director of organizational excellence and innovation, and Dye, said that partnering with a competitor to achieve clinical integration, will allow the hospital to create greater value for its customers by sharing resources and knowledge to integrate efforts, technology, and care improve efficiencies and reduce costs by partnering together to leverage buying power and sharing resources emphasize the work around IHI’s "triple aim" of improving the patient experience, improving the health of populations, and reducing per capita cost Wright and Dye, who are speaking at the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence® conference, offered three tips for how to engage a competitor in such a partnership: Build a foundation of trust and open communication Start with a common goal and shared vision and work from there Bring in a non-biased third party to help with facilitation and building the infrastructure "In health care, the time for agility is now," said Dye. "Having an aligned and focused leadership team with a shared vision working together to sustain and move the strategy forward is essential. Using the Baldrige Criteria has been one of the most impactful tools in our 100-year history and as a result has changed the way our leadership team thinks and makes decisions. I am sure any organization that has implemented and embedded the framework in how it runs its business would agree." To learn more, attend Schneck Medical Center’s special presentation, "Partnering with a Competitor for the Good of Our Communities," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Posted by Christine Schaefer When Iredell-Statesville Schools (I-SS) earned a Baldrige Award in 2008, its dramatic turnaround story (featured in Baldrige 20/20, pp. 68-72) demonstrated the power of the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence to transform a public school system that had been in crisis just six years earlier. Over the past five years, the 21,231-student district in southwestern, North Carolina, has seen its economic-related challenges grow. Cuts in tax-based funding have amounted to millions shaved from annual education budgets. And the number of students poor enough to qualify for free and reduced-price school lunches has risen by 35 percent (to 43 percent of the student population). Yet, according to Dr. Melanie Taylor, I-SS associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction, the district’s use of the Baldrige framework has helped it keep improving the efficiency of its operations and the effectiveness of its instructional programs. Those improvements, she affirmed, have enabled the district to weather the proverbial storm of decreased funding and increased student needs.    Taylor will be presenting on how to use the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence to drive school and districtwide improvements at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference next week. For the benefit of Blogrige readers, she shared the following information in a recent interview. If you were speaking to a school district that is just discovering the Baldrige Education Criteria as a tool to drive systemwide improvements, what would you suggest as your top three tips? 1. Talk with the staff involved: Help the staff to identify their priority areas for improvement, looking at the data you have to support that, and get them involved in identifying what the "big rocks" are. Sometimes it’s an easy win to get them involved in being part of the solution as well as identifying the problem. It’s not always what the leadership might see as a priority area; if workers see it as a major issue, then they tend to be more engaged in the improvement process and have more buy-in along the way. 2. Use the Baldrige Criteria and the Baldrige processes without using all the Baldrige terminology. Using language that is familiar to the workers is less overwhelming. 3. "Go slow to go fast": Keep a pulse on your staff to see where they are in the transition process through both formal check-in meetings and informal conversations. You need to have a combination of that hard and soft data to monitor. You need some folks to tell you what the reality is on how things are going.  What are some key ways in which the Baldrige framework has benefitted Iredell-Statesville Schools? The Baldrige Criteria has really helped us to align our processes and operate more effectively and efficiently as a school district. It has helped us improve our processes and make those processes more aligned and systematic. Our strategic plan and our school improvement plans and classroom plans are now aligned so that we’re all focusing on the same things, and we’re all clear on what our processes are to reach the targeted outcomes. Courtesy of Iredell-Statesville Schools As a district 12 years ago, we had a lot of people who were doing good things, but they were random things. We didn’t really know what was working and what was not working. We didn’t have any good processes in place so that we could share and replicate things that were having a positive impact for students. It’s important to note that our per-pupil expenditure has consistently been low—in the bottom 10 school districts out of 115 in the state (11oth for the past couple of years)—so [using the Baldrige framework] has allowed us to do a lot of things very effectively with very low funding. With all the cuts that public school districts all across the nation have right now, it’s really important to make sure that you’re using your funding in the most efficient and effective manner possible. Despite cuts in funding—we’ve lost $12 million over the last five to six years—we’ve been able to expand programs and continue to increase our academic ranking and our graduation rate. And our academic performance has been improving even though we also have more students from economically disadvantaged families than we did six years ago. Would you share more about your performance improvements and results? Our graduation rate has improved from 61% in 2002 to 88.1% for 2013-2014, and our other metrics also show great growth. Our district’s academic ranking in the state moved from 55th in 2002 to 23rd best in 2013. Our students’ average SAT scores have moved us from a ranking of 57th in North Carolina in 2002 to 13th best in 2013. In 2002, we had a negative fund balance of $2.5 million; because we have been able to operate more efficiently, our fund balance reached $8.76 million in 2013. As a result, we have been able to increase offerings for students, for example, high school credit recovery courses increased from 500 in 2002 to more than 1,000 in 2013. How can other school districts learn more? If a school district would like to contact us to learn more or come visit us to see what this looks like in action, we’d certainly be willing to share. Educational leaders and others can also attend the school district’s presentation, "Using the Baldrige Criteria to Drive Improvement," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference in Baltimore, Maryland on Tuesday, April 8.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Why should and how might an organization integrate the Lean methodology with the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence? When I asked Pattie Skriba, vice president, Business Excellence, of Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, a 2010 Baldrige Award recipient, she said that it has to do with "MUDA 無駄." "MUDA is a Japanese word," she continued, "that means ‘waste’ or non-value-added steps in a process that result in inefficiencies, customer dissatisfaction, and reduced profitability. As a patient, you’ve probably experienced ‘waste’—waiting to see your doctor, delays in treatment, unnecessary tests, or multiple forms requiring the same information. Waste is any activity that you, as a customer, would not pay for." Skriba, who is speaking at the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence® conference, went on to explain. "Baldrige and Lean share a common purpose: value-creation (Criteria for Performance Excellence, 1.1b, 6.1). Baldrige and Lean also share a common focus: process. But Baldrige and Lean are also different." "Lean methodology is a compilation of systematic approaches to remove waste and improve processes and if fully embraced builds a culture of continual improvement. Baldrige, however, is a balanced, business model spanning not only operations improvement but also other critical elements to an organization’s sustainability, such as leadership, strategic planning and implementation, workforce capability, and knowledge management." Skriba continued, "Lean methodology can address many of the criteria in a powerful way.  However, the adoption of the entire Baldrige performance management framework will guide an organization to broader role-model performance. When the two are integrated and ‘operate as a fully interconnected unit’ [Criteria glossary], there is an acceleration of performance and creation of value." So how can the two approaches be integrated? Pattie shared several examples. "At the most basic level, Lean tools can be adopted as the systematic approaches to address some of the individual Criteria items. At Advocate Good Samaritan, senior leaders selected A3 [Lean problem-solving process] combined with the plan-do-study-act [PDSA] methodology as our ‘performance improvement approach’ [Criteria, item P.2c]. This approach is visual and easy to understand (and remember); it creates a true community of problem-solvers as it is deployed to every level of the organization. For example, A3-PDSA is used to ‘create and modify action plans’ [Criteria item 2.2], ‘improve organizational performance’ [Criteria item 4.1], and ‘improve health care services and work processes’ [Criteria item 6.1], and it is the framework for how personal leadership skills are developed [Criteria items 1.2, 5.2]." Skriba went on to share other examples of how Lean methodology can address Criteria items. Criteria item 6.2 asks how organizations control the costs of operations. Kanban (Lean scheduling system) or 2-bin system (Lean inventory control system) is a systematic approach to controlling the costs of supplies. Advocate Good Samaritan’s deployment of this Lean approach led to a dramatic reduction in inventory supply costs by almost 40% between 2012 and 2013. Department visual management is used to "ensure that the day-to-day operation of work processes meet requirements" and lead to "the in-process measures used to control and improve those processes" (Criteria item, 6.1b). "We use visual management to control processes such as reduction in our ventilator days, productivity, and recruitment of physicians yielding excellent outcomes," Skriba explained. Standard work, a foundational concept of Lean, is a simple, written description of the safest, highest-quality, most-efficient way known to perform a task or achieve an outcome. "In both clinical and nonclinical areas, standard work is used for deploying key processes," Skriba said.  "This reduces variability caregiver to caregiver." Standard work has enabled Advocate Good Samaritan to achieve and sustain top-decile performance in several clinical outcomes including the reduction of patient falls. "The Lean approach can also be the ‘L’ in ADLI [Baldrige's evaluation process that focuses on approach-deployment-learning-and integration]. It becomes the improvement engine for every defined approach in the Baldrige Criteria. Organizational processes such as strategic planning, hiring, and performance management can be looked at through the Lean lens to remove waste and improve. Again, at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, A3-PDSA is utilized to improve these Baldrige-driven processes." To learn more about how Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital reduces MUDA, attend its special presentation, "Integration of Lean with Baldrige," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Posted by Christine Schaefer Pewaukee School District Ceremony for 2013 Baldrige Award Recipients (pictured from left to right): U.S. Department of Commerce Under Secretary for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Patrick Gallagher, Baldrige Foundation Chair George Benson, Pewaukee School District Board of Education Clerk Larry Dux, Pewaukee School District Superintendent JoAnn Sternke, and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. Photo by Eddie Arrossi. "It may seem like Baldrige is all results and processes," said JoAnn Sternke, superintendent of the Wisconsin district honored at the official ceremony for 2013 Baldrige Award winners Sunday evening in Baltimore, Maryland. "But at the heart there’s a culture around continuous improvement [and] also around a passion for core values. And at the heart of the Pewaukee School District’s journey are incredibly passionate people …  and they come to work each and every day wanting to do a great job serving kids and families." Sternke accepted the Baldrige Award on behalf of her suburban school district’s board of education, 312 employees, and 2,800 students. In congratulating the other 2013 Baldrige Award winner, Sutter Davis Hospital, Sternke compared the life-saving missions of the two organizations and sectors, noting, "You literally save lives; we do it by giving students life chances, and we take that very, very seriously. We’ve learned so much from our friends in health care because we share those ‘heart tugging’ missions." Sternke recalled that her school district began its "journey" of continuous improvement many years ago and that it has had a strategic planning process in place for over 20 years. "Our visionary board of education created a strand in 1998 called Quality Systematic Improvement," she noted. She credited Larry Dux, a member of the board of education and its current clerk, for seeing in 2006 how the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence framework "fits us." "Since then we have dedicated ourselves to being systematic in the use of the Baldrige continuous improvement process," continued Sternke, "and … we’ve seen student achievement go up in ways that we never thought imaginable. We’ve become more efficient and more effective. And these successes aren’t just figures and statistics; they do change lives. And in the process, we’ve become an innovative force in education." "We’re transforming how we deliver learning for our students, and that’s creating life chances, and that’s opening the door to each child’s future," she added. In concluding her remarks, Sternke said, "For those pondering whether or not to pursue this Baldrige process, I say boldly, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’" Sutter Davis Hospital Ceremony for 2013 Baldrige Award Recipients (pictured from left to right): U.S. Department of Commerce Under Secretary for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Patrick Gallagher, Baldrige Foundation Chair George Benson, Sutter Health Sacramento Sierra Region President James Conforti, Sutter Davis Hospital CEO Janet Wagner, and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. Photo by Eddie Arrossi. "Sutter Davis Hospital is a small community hospital," said CEO Janet Wagner, speaking at the Baldrige Award ceremony Sunday evening. "In fact, we are one of the smallest full-service hospitals in the Sutter Health system, with a lot of good results. And I’m proud to be a voice tonight for small hospitals." Wagner said that her organization’s adoption of the Baldrige framework for performance excellence "grew from a desire to deliver the safest, quality care to the communities we serve." In looking to move from being a good organization to become a great one, Wagner recalled, "We needed a framework to challenge our assumptions, guide our process improvements, and focus our team on sustaining results. Thus began our Baldrige journey." The effort "was not always easy," acknowledged Wagner. "Some thought the journey was going to be too much work; some thought we didn’t have all the resources we needed—because, after all, we are a hospital, we are open 24 hours a day, we never close, so we stay busy." But she noted that over the last six to eight years, Sutter Davis Hospital stayed the course with its focus on continuous improvement, guided by the Baldrige Criteria, engaging the staff, physicians, and volunteers, as well as collaborating with community partners, particularly the hospital’s federally qualified health clinics. Among remarkable results achieved and sustained by the hospital in recent years, Wagner highlighted its top-decile patient satisfaction and clinical quality outcomes. She noted that Sutter Davis Hospital has been named among "Top 100 Hospitals" in the nation by Truven Health Analytics. She also pointed to the hospital’s reduction in wait times and 30-day readmission rates for the emergency room. Wagner added, "The Sutter Davis team has created a culture of accountability when it comes to our patients and families and has truly demonstrated transforming care—the kind of care that we want to see delivered in our country."    

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey A turtle is the mascot that staff members of 2013 Baldrige Award recipient Sutter Davis Hospital chose as their representative. A turtle is a survivor, it has a long life-span, and it has a hard shell. Because in health care, said Sutter Davis CEO Janet Wagner, sometimes you have to have a thick skin, and sometimes when you embark on a Baldrige continuous improvement journey, you have to retreat into a shell to self-assess in order to take the next step forward. Sutter Davis Hospital CEO Janet Wagner, speaking at the Baldrige Award ceremony on April 6, 2014. Photo by Eddie Arrossi. During the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference, Wagner described Sutter Davis’s leadership lessons learned during its seven-year journey to implement the Baldrige Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence as a management framework. The 48-bed, nonprofit, acute care hospital began its journey by identifying its core competency-a Criteria concept meaning what your organization is best at, something that cannot be easily replicated or copied by the competition, and something that gives you a market advantage. The hospital identified its core competency as a "culture of caring." "We really believe [in this culture,]" Wagner said. "When someone comes into our care, we want them to feel safe, to realize that they are getting the best possible care that we have to offer. In addition, we want people to feel our culture of caring when they walk into our hospital with eye contact, with friendliness, with just making people feel as if they are at home." The culture is encompassed in how we care for our patients, how we care for our physicians, and how we care for each other as team members, she added; the core competency for Sutter Davis is the "glue that holds it all together." Wagner said that understanding its core competency and integrating the Criteria did not come easily or quickly. In its first Baldrige-based state award application, the hospital, which is part of a large, integrated system in northern California, originally had three core competencies. Using examiner feedback, Sutter Davis continually refined its core competency over the years, including talking to all of its employees and physicians about what a "culture of caring" means. Staff members gave about 400 different answers. So the leadership team set out to define what such a culture meant and how people were going to live it each and every day. "That led us to the understanding that the Criteria really focused us; it really kept us on track," she said." To stay on track and get results for our patients-both quality and safety-you have to have an engaged workforce. . . When everyone’s engaged, we have very consistent results." To aid engagement, Wagner suggested making some employee events fun, so that the learning really sticks. And the key was that the leadership team joined in the fun. In Sutter Davis’s case, one learning was the need to embrace change. "Organizations don’t change. It’s the people inside the organizations that change," Wagner said. Another breakthrough learning from Baldrige regarded results, she said. The  goal was not only to get improved results but to learn to sustain them. And leadership team members at Sutter Davis took it a step farther-they learned to course correct as a team, taking a step back to evaluate results when needed; such a strategy led the hospital to actual be able to reliably predict its results. There was another lesson learned from the Criteria in regards to the leadership system. Wagner said her leadership team members talked about how they lead (category 1 of the Criteria), but they didn’t write it down. After the third year, they wrote down the core of the leadership system, with patient-centered care first and a never-ending circle of leadership that includes values, how to execute the strategy, and accountability. "Our aha moments from reading the Criteria were actually more self-created than getting awards or recognition along the way because we were so excited about understanding the Criteria and really making the leap," she said, "and this was one of them-having a strong leadership system in place that we could then evaluate for effectiveness." Sutter Davis has dashboards for each facility, with cascading priorities to each department. From there, one-page department profiles are created to show how that department is contributing to the dashboard, and this goes all the way down to the individual employee, whose work is aligned across pillars. Because of these tools, "Every employee knows exactly what and how they are contributing to the overall success of Sutter Davis Hospital," she said. Another benefit learned from Baldrige, Wagner said, was the challenge of improving the care of its community; health care organizations have always been involved in their communities but have rarely been challenged to really improve and measure the care of those communities. So, Sutter Davis set out to ensure that every child in its community was covered by insurance and immunized. For kindergarten, nearly 90% of children in Yolo county are now immunized-and the county includes many migrant workers, indigent populations, and non-English speakers. "I have learned to love that Criteria," Wagner said, with the leadership team "using that book now more than ever." Leadership team members have really focused on the word "personal" that appears in Criteria item 1.1-how do senior leaders personally contribute? "It wasn’t until we began really owning [leadership] individually on a personal basis, living it, role-modeling those values that are in our leadership system and being accountable to ourselves first and then holding each other accountable that we really narrowed in on that personal touch on being a senior leader and what it means to be a senior leader." Sutter Davis is still working on some common health care obstacles to get to its ultimate goal of seamless and continuous care, whether the care is received in a hospital, physician’s office, or urgent care. Wagner added, "Feedback [received from submitting Baldrige Award applications] is what has helped to propel our organization forward year over year-not being defensive about it but really understanding it and putting it into practice."