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Core Values and Concepts
These beliefs and behaviors are embedded in high- performing organizations. They are the foundation for integrating key performance and operational requirements within a results-oriented framework that creates a basis for action, feedback, and ongoing success.
The Baldrige Health Care Criteria are built on the following set of interrelated core values and concepts:
Systems perspective Visionary leadership Patient-focused excellence Valuing people Organizational learning and agility Focus on success Managing for innovation Management by fact Societal responsibility and community health Ethics and transparency Delivering value and results
Systems Perspective
A systems perspective means managing all the components of your organization as a unified whole to achieve your mission, ongoing success, and performance excellence.
Successfully managing overall organizational performance requires realization of your organization as a system with interdependent operations. Organization-specific synthesis, alignment, and integration make the system successful. Synthesis means looking at your organization as a whole and incorporates key organizational attributes, including your core competencies, strategic objectives, action plans, and work systems. Alignment means using the key organizational linkages to ensure consistency of plans, processes, measures, and actions. Integration builds on alignment, so that the individual components of your performance management system operate in a fully interconnected, unified, and mutually beneficial manner to deliver anticipated results.
These concepts are depicted in the Baldrige Health Care Criteria overview (page 1). When your organization takes a systems perspective, your senior leaders focus on strategic directions and on patients and other customers. Your senior leaders monitor, respond to, and manage performance based on your results. With a systems perspective, you use your measures, indicators, core competencies, and organizational knowledge to build your key strategies, link these strategies with your work systems and key processes, and align your resources to improve your overall performance and your focus on patients, other customers, and stakeholders. The core values and concepts, the seven Health Care Criteria categories, and the scoring guidelines are the system’s building blocks and integrating mechanism.
Visionary Leadership
Your organization’s senior leaders should create a leadership system that includes both health care provider and
administrative/operational leaders. This system should foster the integration and alignment of health care and business directions. Your organization’s senior leaders should set a vision for the organization, create a focus on patients and other customers, demonstrate clear and visible organizational values and ethics, and set high expectations for the workforce. The vision, values, and expectations should balance the needs of all your stakeholders. Your leaders should also ensure the creation of strategies, systems, and methods for building knowledge and capabilities, stimulating innovation, requiring accountability, achieving performance excellence, and thereby ensuring ongoing organizational success. The values and strategies leaders define should help guide all of your organization’s activities and decisions. Senior leaders should inspire and encourage your entire workforce to contribute, to develop and learn, to be innovative, and to embrace meaningful change. Senior leaders should be responsible to your organization’s governance body for their actions and performance, and the governance body should be responsible ultimately to all your stakeholders for your organization’s and its senior leaders’ ethics, actions, and performance. Senior leaders should serve as role models through their ethical behavior and their personal involvement in planning, providing a supportive environment for innovation, communicating, coaching and motivating the workforce, developing future leaders, reviewing organizational performance, and recognizing workforce members. As role models, they can reinforce ethics, values, and expectations while building leadership, commitment, and initiative throughout your organization.
Patient-Focused Excellence
Your patients and other customers are the ultimate judges of your performance and the quality of your health care services. Thus, your organization must consider all features and characteristics of patient care delivery (including those not directly related to medical, clinical, and health services) and all modes of customer access and support that contribute value to your patients and other customers. Such behavior leads to patient and other customer acquisition, satisfaction, preference, and loyalty; positive referrals; and, ultimately, the ongoing success of your business. Patient-focused excellence has both current and future components: understanding the desires of patients and other customers today and anticipating future desires and health care marketplace potential. Many factors may influence value and satisfaction over the course of your patients’ and other customers’ experience with your organization. Primary among these factors is the degree of patient safety throughout the health care delivery process. An additional factor is your organization’s management of patient and other customer relationships, which helps build trust, confidence, and loyalty. Additional factors include the availability of clear information on likely health and functional status outcomes, the responsiveness of
health care providers and ancillary staff members, cost, and the quality and availability of continuing care. For many patients, an important factor is the ability to participate in decisions about their health care. This leads to the requirement for developing systems and processes to ensure that patients and family members are fully involved in the care team, educated so they fully understand their condition and the plan of care, and supported in making the medical decisions that are best for them.
Patient-focused excellence means much more than reducing errors, merely meeting accreditation specifications, or reducing complaints. Nevertheless, these factors contribute to your patients’ and other customers’ view of your organization and thus are also important parts of patient- focused excellence.
In addition, your success in recovering from accidents, service errors, and mistakes is crucial for retaining patients and other customers and engaging them for the long term. Patient-focused excellence also involves increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the services and care provided and working to ensure that care is provided in the most appropriate setting.
A patient-focused organization addresses not only the health care service characteristics that meet basic patient and other customer requirements but also those unique features and characteristics that differentiate the organization from its competitors. This differentiation may be based on innovative health care service offerings, combinations of health care service offerings, price, customized offerings, multiple access and outward communication mechanisms, time to appointment, rapid response, innovative patient conveniences (e.g., valet parking, gourmet menus, or hotel accommodations), or special relationships.
A major long-term investment associated with health care excellence is investment in creating and sustaining an assessment system focused on health care outcomes. This entails becoming familiar with research findings and ongoing application of assessment methods. Patient-focused excellence is thus a strategic concept. It is directed toward patient and other customer retention and loyalty, referral of new patients, stronger brand recognition, market share gain, and growth. It demands constant sensitivity to changing and emerging patient, other customer, and market requirements and to the factors that drive customer engagement. It demands close attention to the voice of the customer. It demands anticipating changes in the marketplace. Therefore, patient-focused excellence demands a patient-focused culture and organizational agility.
Valuing People
An organization’s success depends on an engaged workforce that benefits from meaningful work, clear organizational direction, the opportunity to learn, and accountability for performance. That engaged workforce must also have a safe, trusting, and cooperative environment. The successful organization has a culture of inclusion that capitalizes on the diverse backgrounds, knowledge, skills, creativity, and
motivation of its workforce and partners. Such an organization values all people who have a stake in the organization, including customers, community members, and other people affected by the organization’s actions. Valuing the people in your workforce means committing to their engagement, development, and well-being. Increasingly, this may involve offering flexible work practices that are tailored to varying workplace and home life needs. Major challenges in valuing your workforce members include (1) demonstrating your leaders’ commitment to their success, (2) providing motivation and recognition that go beyond the regular compensation system, (3) offering development and progression within your organization, (4) sharing your organization’s knowledge so that your workforce can better serve your patients and other customers and contribute to achieving your strategic objectives, (5) creating an environment that encourages intelligent risk taking to achieve innovation, (6) developing a system of workforce and organizational accountability for performance, and (7) creating an inclusive environment for a diverse workforce. The success of your workforce members—including your leaders—depends on their having opportunities to learn. This learning includes preparing people for future organizational core competencies. On-the-job training offers a cost-effective way to cross-train and to link training more closely to your organization’s capacity needs and priorities. Workforce members’ learning includes building discipline knowledge and retraining to adjust to a changing health care environment, and enhancing knowledge of measurement systems that influence outcome assessments and clinical guidelines, decision trees, care bundles, or critical pathways. If your organization relies on volunteers, their personal development and learning are also important to consider. To accomplish their overall goals, successful organizations build internal and external partnerships with people and with other organizations. Internal partnerships might include cooperation among administrators, staff, physicians, and independent practitioners, as well as between labor and management. Forming internal partnerships might also involve creating network relationships among people across work units and locations, between physicians and other caregivers, or between employees and volunteers to improve flexibility, responsiveness, and knowledge sharing, as well as to support effective flow of patients through the healthcare system. External partnerships might be with customers, such as third-party payors; suppliers; business associations; education, community, or social service organizations; and other health care providers. All of these people can contribute to your organization’s ongoing success.
Organizational Learning and Agility
Success in today’s ever-changing, globally competitive environment demands continual organizational learning and agility. Agility requires a capacity for rapid change and for flexibility in operations. Health care organizations face ever-
processes, operations, health care delivery model, and business model, with the purpose of creating new value for stakeholders. Innovation should lead your organization to new dimensions of performance. Innovation requires a supportive environment, a process for identifying strategic opportunities, and the pursuit of intelligent risks. Innovation and continuous improvement are different, but complementary, concepts. Successful organizations use both approaches to improve performance.
Innovation is no longer strictly the purview of health care researchers; innovation is important for all aspects of your operations and all work systems and work processes. Your organization should be led and managed so that identifying strategic opportunities and taking intelligent risks become part of the learning culture. Innovation should be integrated into daily work and be supported by your performance improvement system. Systematic processes for identifying strategic opportunities should reach across your entire organization.
Innovation may arise from adapting innovations in other industries to achieve a breakthrough in the health care industry. It builds on the accumulated knowledge of your organization and its people and the innovations of competitors. It may involve collaboration among people who do not normally work together and are in different parts of the organization. Therefore, the ability to rapidly disseminate and capitalize on new and accumulated knowledge is critical to driving organizational innovation.
Management by Fact
Management by fact requires you to measure and analyze your organization’s performance, both inside the organization and in your competitive environment. Measurements should derive from organizational needs and strategy, and they should provide critical data and information about key processes, outputs, results, outcomes, and competitor and industry performance. Organizations need many types of data and information to effectively manage their performance. Data and information may come in many forms, such as numerical, graphical, and qualitative, and from many sources, including internal processes, surveys, and social media. Performance measurement should include measurement of health care outcomes; patient, other customer, service, and process performance; comparisons of operational, market, and competitive performance; supplier, workforce, partner, cost, and financial performance; governance and compliance results; and accomplishment of strategic objectives.
A major consideration in performance improvement and change management is the selection and use of performance measures or indicators. The measures or indicators you select should best represent the factors that lead to improved health care outcomes; improved patient, other customer, operational, financial, and societal performance; and healthier communities. A comprehensive yet carefully culled set of measures or indicators tied to patient/other customer and organizational performance requirements provides a clear basis for aligning all processes with your
organization’s goals. You may need measures and indicators to support you in making decisions in a rapidly changing environment. By analyzing data from your tracking processes, you can evaluate the measures or indicators themselves and change them to better support your goals. Analysis means extracting larger meaning from data and information to support evaluation, decision making, improvement, and innovation. It entails using data to determine trends, projections, and cause-and-effect relationships that might not otherwise be evident. Analysis supports a variety of purposes, such as planning, reviewing your overall performance, improving operations, managing change, and comparing your performance with competitors’ or with best-practice benchmarks. To facilitate analysis, data may need to be aggregated from various sources. Data may also need to be segmented by, for example, markets, health care service lines, and workforce groups to gain deeper understanding.
Societal Responsibility and Community
Health
Your organization’s leaders should stress responsibilities to the public, the consideration of societal well-being and benefit, and the need to foster improved community health. Leaders should be role models for your organization and its workforce in the protection of public health, safety, and the environment. This protection applies to any impact of your organization’s operations. Also, your organization should emphasize resource conservation and waste reduction at the source. Planning should anticipate adverse impacts from facilities management, as well as from distribution, transportation, use, and disposal of medical waste, radiation waste, chemicals, and biohazards. Effective planning should reduce or prevent problems; provide for a forthright response if problems occur; and make available the information and support needed to maintain public awareness, safety, and confidence. Your organization should meet all local, state, and federal laws and regulatory requirements and should also treat these and related requirements as opportunities to excel beyond minimal compliance. Considering societal well-being and benefit means leading and supporting—within the limits of your resources—the environmental, social, and economic systems in your organization’s sphere of influence. Public health services and the support of the general health of the community are important societal responsibilities of health care organizations. Such leadership and support might include efforts to establish free clinics or affordable health care programs, increase public health awareness programs, or foster neighborhood services for the elderly. It also might involve being a role model for socially important issues, practicing resource conservation, reducing your carbon footprint, improving health care industry practices, and sharing nonproprietary information. For a role-model organization, leadership also entails influencing other organizations, private and public, to partner for these purposes.
Managing societal responsibilities requires your organization to use appropriate measures and your leaders to assume responsibility for those measures.
Ethics and Transparency
Your organization should stress ethical behavior in all stakeholder transactions and interactions. Your organization’s governance body should require highly ethical conduct and monitor all conduct accordingly. Ethical conduct should address both business and health care practices, such as nondiscriminatory patient treatment policies and the protection of patients’ rights and privacy. Your senior leaders should be role models of ethical behavior and make their expectations of the workforce very clear.
Your organization’s ethical principles are the foundation for your culture and values. They distinguish right from wrong. Clearly articulated ethical principles, along with your organizational values, empower your people to make effective decisions and may serve as boundary conditions for determining organizational norms and prohibitions.
Transparency is characterized by consistently candid and open communication on the part of leadership and management and by the sharing of clear and accurate information. The benefits of transparency are manifold. Transparency is a key factor in workforce engagement and allows people to see why actions are being taken and how they can contribute. Transparency also is important in interactions with customers and other stakeholders, giving
them a sense of involvement, engagement, and confidence in your organization. Ethical behavior and transparency build trust in the organization and a belief in its fairness and integrity that is valued by all key stakeholders.
Delivering Value and Results
By delivering value to key stakeholders, your organization builds loyalty, contributes to growing the economy, and contributes to society. To meet the sometimes conflicting and changing aims that balancing value implies, your organizational strategy should explicitly include key stakeholder requirements. This will help ensure that plans and actions meet differing stakeholder needs and avoid adverse impacts on any stakeholders. A balanced composite of leading and lagging performance measures is an effective means to communicate short- and longer-term priorities, monitor actual performance, and provide a clear basis for improving results. Your organization’s performance measurements need to focus on key results. Results should be used to deliver and balance value for your key stakeholders—your patients and their families; payors; other customers; your workforce, suppliers, and partners; health profession students; investors; the public; and the community. Thus results need to be a composite of measures that include not just financial results, but also health care and process results; patient, other customer, and workforce satisfaction and engagement results; and leadership, strategy, and societal performance.
