Small-Town Touch, Big-City Innovation, World-Class Aspirations

The healthcare system in the United States is at a critical crossroads. Costs are rising, measures of healthcare quality are well below those of other industrialized nations, and public and regulatory scrutiny is increasing. Healthcare leaders are searching for more effective, efficient, and sustainable operational models to address the mounting challenges they face. We at Schneck Medical Center in Seymour, Indiana, chose the Baldrige Excellence Framework to guide our organization, to accelerate our performance improvement journey, and to create sustainable results in our core services. The Baldrige Framework uses a systematic approach to innovation and improvement in seven key management areas. These seven areas were leadership; strategic planning; customer focus; measurement, analysis, and knowl- edge management; workforce focus; operations focus; and results (Baldrige Performance Excellence Program 2015). In this article, we describe our Baldrige journey. We address why we chose to use the Framework, how we engaged our key stakeholders, and what challenges we faced and lessons we learned along the way. In addition, we detail how Schneck's focus on performance improvement has resulted in significant returns to the organization. Throughout the article, we refer to our pursuit of performance excellence as a "journey," and it is indeed just that. Quality improvement takes time, because it is a transformation with many steps. World-class performance is attainable only with years of work and constant refinement.