The National Institute of Standards and Technology has announced four winners of the 2016 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and two of them are healthcare organizations.
The two healthcare category winners are Kindred Nursing and Rehabilitation Center-Mountain Valley in Kellogg, Idaho, and Memorial Hermann Sugar Land (Texas) Hospital. The other two winners — Don Chalmers Ford in Rio Rancho, N.M., and Momentum Group in Irvine, Calif. — earned the award in the small business category.
Here are five things to know about the award and this year's winning healthcare organizations.
1. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality is the nation's highest award given annually by the White House for performance excellence through innovation, improvement and leadership. Recipients fall in one of six categories: manufacturing, service, small business, healthcare, education and nonprofit, which includes government agencies.
2. Winners are selected by an independent board of examiners. This year, 34 organizations applied.
3. "Like those before them, the 2016 honorees have created robust processes and cultures that focus on benefitting their customers, workforce and communities, and in doing so, have achieved outstanding operational and business success," said Robert Fangmeyer, director of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program.
4. Kindred-Mountain Valley, a 68-bed skilled nursing facility, is the first ever organization in Idaho to receive a Baldrige Award. The SNF has received a five-star rating from CMS for seven straight years. It also has a 90 percent employee retention rate, which is more than 20 percent above national industry average.
5. Memorial Herman Sugar Land is a 149-bed acute care hospital with 641 employees. The hospital ranks in the top 10 percent nationally for numerous performance metrics, including emergency department arrival-to-discharge time and use of computerized physician order entry.