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Improvement of the Year AwardThe Improvement of the Year Award

Article in the Mason Gazette about the 2008 Health Care Quality Improvement Awards.

The 2008 Quality Improvement of the Year Award Annual Banquet and Awards Ceremony was held April 24, 2008
 
Sponsors of the 2008 Improvement of the Year Award:

  • Taylor-Oden Enterprises, Inc, Founding Sponsor
    (Carolyn A. Taylor, BSN'78, MSN'86, MBA'94, and Leslie Taylor)
  • David S. Goldberg, MS'06 and Claudia Goldberg

George Mason University College of Health and Human Services invites healthcare organizations to participate in the “Quality Improvement of the Year” Award.

What is it? The College of Health and Human Services at George Mason University established the Quality Improvement of the Year Award in 2004. The award recognizes quality improvement teams in hospitals or healthcare systems for their successful improvement efforts and ensures that the hard work of quality improvement teams is appreciated and acknowledged. In doing so, the award brings together quality improvement specialists from different, and often competing, organizations for collaboration.

Why is it unique? Prestigious health care quality awards are given locally and nationally. Awards such as the Baldridge National Quality Program from the National Institute of Standards and Technology focus on an organization’s total improvement effort. Others, such as Iams from Inova Health System, honor participants within one institution. The Quality Improvement of the Year Award broadens this scope by focusing on project-by-project reviews across organizations. As such, the Quality Improvement of the Year Award offers improvement teams a unique opportunity for recognition, not solely within their own organization, but among a prestigious group of leading healthcare organizations. Our intention is not to reinvent the wheel but to fill a gap for communication and recognition among the leading healthcare systems in the Mid-Atlantic.

We know quality improvement. In 2001, the founder of the award developed and published a methodology for examining the impact of Quality improvement projects. Our method of assessing quality improvement efforts is well documented and relies on a careful review of the project and a quantitative analysis of improvement practices. Since the publication of our methodology, we have conducted reviews of the improvement efforts of 313 projects in 137 organizations, including Inova Health System, Prince William Health System and CentraHealth in Virginia; George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C.; Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland; and the State of New Jersey Department of Human Services Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.

Success continues. For the 2005 award, applications were solicited from every hospital in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. We were pleased to receive eight submissions from a diverse range of healthcare organizations. For the 2006 award, we expanded our target region to include hospitals in New Jersey, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, North Carolina, and Kentucky. In 2007, we solicited applications from New York, Connecticut, Ohio, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. For 2008 21 projects were submitted with four winners.

We can do it together. It is our goal to expand our target area from the Mid-Atlantic region to include healthcare organizations nationwide by 2012. We ask that you will join us in rewarding these true heroes: the hard working employees at your organization and others, who strive to improve the quality of healthcare and in doing so, save lives. With your help, not only can these individuals be given the recognition they deserve, but the Quality Improvement of the Year Award can become a nationally recognized standard of improvement in the industry.

How can my organization become involved? We are currently accepting submissions for consideration for the 2008 Improvement of the Year Award. The deadline for applications is March 20, 2009 your organization can also become a sponsor of the award. To learn more about our levels of sponsorship and corresponding organizational benefits, please contact Marcia Bearor at 703-993-1931.