Letter from the Chief Medical Officer
Dear Colleagues:
Brigham and Women’s Hospital continues to be a national leader in patient safety, quality of care and technological innovation. During this last year, we received several awards and outside recognitions. It’s with great pride that we are putting many of these awards on display in the 75 Francis St. lobby.
The National Committee for Quality Health Care—now known as the National Quality Forum or NQF—gave BWH its prestigious National Quality Health Care Award after scrutinizing eight dimensions of quality: leadership commitment; strategic planning; patient-centered practices; innovative informatics and application of new technologies; building a committed workforce; evidence-based performance measurement and improvement systems; strong financial management; and community health needs.
Our collective willingness to share our successes and help other health care organizations improve gained us the Collaborative Sharing of Best Practices Award from Masspro. This award comes in recognition of BWH’s work to spread performance improvement systems as many of our talented staff shared our experiences during Quality Improvement Collaboratives.
BWH’s push for excellence and our insistence on measuring this excellence secured our place in the Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy. The Balanced Scorecard Collaborative recognized BWH and the United States Postal Service with this distinction for achieving “breakthrough performance results.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services gave BWH its distinguished Organ Donation Medal of Honor in recognition of the hospital’s outstanding support for and continuing success in organ donation.
Our commitment to making health care safer through innovative technology was recognized with the first ever Betsy Lehman Patient Safety Recognition Award for organizational excellence. This award is a direct result of our investment in our landmark electronic Medication Administration Record (eMAR) and barcoding system and the time and effort everyone at BWH put into it to make its implementation so successful.
We’re proudly displaying the crystal award from the University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) given to BWH for our demonstrated excellence in high-quality, safe, effective and equitable care.
Everyone at BWH should be proud of these awards. Our drive to improve upon the status quo and our willingness to try new and innovative technologies has placed us among the nation’s leaders in improving the quality of care we provide our patients each and every day. We should all take great pride in our collective accomplishments.