Frontiers: Quality: Shaping Culture, Taking Action

Lead articles by Sr. Mary Jean Ryan, FSM; Glen A. Barton

Softbound, 44 pp, Spring 2004, ISSN 0748-8157
Order code: WWW1-J478,
Price: $29.00

The quality factor in healthcare has been in the spotlight throughout recent years. With tragic medical errors making national headlines, hospitals everywhere are pushing quality control. Despite sincere efforts to improve quality, will hospitals ever go beyond simply meeting accreditation requirements? If quality is going to be central to the mission of each and every healthcare organization, there must be a clear and unequivocal effort to make quality a sustainable strategic focus in the same way that growth, financial objectives, and human resources are handled. What would healthcare delivery look like if quality were part of the strategic fabric of every organization?

To help answer this critical question, Frontiers has asked two well-respected persons from very different worlds to share their perspective with us. The first article, entitled "Achieving and Sustaining Quality in Healthcare," is written by Sister Mary Jean Ryan, president and CEO of SSM Healthcare in St. Louis, Missouri. SSM Healthcare became the first healthcare recipient of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and has been cited by both Baldrige and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations as having a culture of continuous quality improvement (CQI).

The second article is written by Glen A. Barton, former CEO of Caterpillar Inc. in Peoria, Illinois, and former chair of the Business Roundtable Retirement Task Force. In his introduction, Barton states that in 2003, Caterpillar spent in excess of $500 billion in healthcare costs for employees, their dependents, and retirees. Tapping many of the techniques that Caterpillar has used in manufacturing, it recommends to healthcare organizations a number of tools and methods for enhancing quality.

The examples provided by SSM Health Care and Caterpillar, as well as the commentaries written by Margaret E. O'Kane, Vinod K. Sahney, Ph.D., and Sandra Potthoff, Ph.D. focus the quality discussion on how to create the cultural changes necessary to make quality part of our core business functions.