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With increasing pressure to transform the healthcare delivery system, organizations face enormous challenges and opportunities to improve quality and decrease costs. The rapidity of change has been accelerated by the regulatory changes, reducing profit margins & changing customer expectations and it is imperative that hospitals and health care providers develop more effective and efficient ways of delivering care.

This makes us think -What are the frameworks or process improvement approaches that are being used by hospitals and health systems to transform their organizations and maximize positive outcomes? The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program provides healthcare organizations with one such framework to identify improvement opportunities, develop best practices, and attain and sustain top performance. Baldrige is a proven improvement and innovation framework to assess the functioning and operations in the following key areas: leadership; strategic planning; customer focus; measurement, analysis & knowledge management; workforce focus; operations focus; and results by applying this framework in daily operations. In addition to these benefits, the organizations can also apply for the Prestigious Baldrige award by CII /RBNQA /Malcolm Baldrige USA and be recognized in the industry for the best practices. Research has proven that the adoption of Baldrige practices leads to higher organizational performance.

The impact of using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence can be significant in improving quality, reducing costs, and becoming the market leader. As the Baldrige framework propagates, Differentiation through demonstration of top performance is essential for survivability and sustainability. Today’s healthcare environment is one of constant change. Healthcare leaders are still finding a footing in the quest to achieve long-term sustainability in this new environment. They need to constantly ask themselves, “How can we achieve the level of performance that is needed to be successful in the future?”

This organization found the Baldrige Framework to be the field guide they needed to navigate the steep and often obscured ascent to world-class performance. They found their core competencies— Performance-driven culture, Execution, Technological edge & strong community focus as the footholds that they needed to support them in the climb.

This is a case study of a Tertiary care hospital that was struggling with the challenge of shrinking market size and reducing community confidence. Decided to do something path-breaking, the organization decided to implement the Baldrige framework.

The framework requires asking a lot of questions that helps the organization in channelizing the already scarce resources in the right direction. It mandates that the organization needs to define its key stakeholders and their requirements. And as a part of this exercise, two main healthcare segments were identified. As an outcome of this activity ‘Affordability’ and ‘Transparency’ was identified as the key requirements by both the key stakeholders – Patients and the Community

The organization made sure that the changed Stakeholder requirements were made a part of the strategic planning process and made as the key strategic objectives of the organization. The critical link between the strategic objective & the core competency (Leveraging on technology to aid in process improvement) was established to meet the customer and stakeholder requirements, and deliver customer and stakeholder value. This was achieved by identifying process owners at each levels, integrating it with the performance management system and continuous and rigorous monitoring of DASHBOARD results.

This structured approached helped in first identifying what is of value to the customer & achieving the desired results and regular course correction when needed. The figure below describes the Strategic planning process & the strategy deployment process.