Finding the frontier of hospital management

The frontier of demonstrated high-performance community hospital management is a valuable guide to the potential of this important healthcare sector. The best documented frontier cases are recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, a varied set of 34 U.S. community hospitals in nine states. As validated by trained independent examiners, recipient data suggest that performance at or near the best decile of current distributions can be sustained simultaneously across several critical dimensions. However, these hospitals operate substantially differently from tradition, emphasizing a broadly communicated mission, a supportive learning culture, universal measurement and benchmarking, and systematic process improvement.