CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--UHC announced today the top-performing academic medical centers that have won the Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership Award, formerly named the UHC Quality Leadership Award. The award is given to UHC member academic medical centers that have demonstrated superior performance as measured by the UHC Quality and Accountability Study, which UHC has conducted annually since 2005.
The 2015 winners are:
- NYU Langone Medical Center
- Rush University Medical Center
- Mayo Clinic Hospital – Rochester
- Emory University Hospital
- Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin Froedtert Hospital
- University of Colorado Hospital (UCHealth)
- University of Utah Health Care
- Houston Methodist Hospital
- The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
- Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center
- Beaumont Hospital – Royal Oak
- Tufts Medical Center
- The University of Kansas Hospital Authority
“This year’s winners epitomize the persistence and commitment of academic medical centers to instill a culture of accountability and adaptability in a time of unprecedented change in the health care industry,” said Julie Cerese, senior vice president, Performance Improvement. “We have seen many innovations in the use of performance improvement tools and strategies since the Quality and Accountability Study was introduced a decade ago, but what has not changed during that time is the core characteristics of top-performing organizations that were identified in the seminal 2005 study. Those characteristics—shared sense of purpose, successful leadership style, accountability mechanisms, focus on results, and collaboration—were once again hallmarks of this year’s winning organizations.”
UHC’s Quality and Accountability Study was designed to help academic medical centers identify structures and processes associated with high performance in quality and safety across a broad spectrum of patient care activity. The Institute of Medicine’s six domains of care—safety, timeliness, effectiveness, efficiency, equity, and patient centeredness—were again used as a guide in structuring the study criteria.
This year, 102 UHC member institutions were included in the analysis, which used performance data from a variety of sources, including the UHC Clinical Data Base/Resource Manager™, the UHC Core Measures Data Base, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Healthcare Safety Network. As in previous years, the scoring and ranking methodology was refined for the 2015 study to ensure that contemporary measures of quality and safety are included.
The award was renamed in honor of Bernard “Bernie” Birnbaum, MD, a noted health care leader and former member of the UHC Member Board of Directors. Dr. Birnbaum, who served as the senior vice president and vice dean, chief of hospital operations, for NYU Langone Medical Center, died on September 14, 2015.
“Bernie was passionate about improving quality and safety in health care and was extremely engaged with UHC and its members to bring progress toward those ends,” said Irene Thompson, vice chair, AMC Networks Board of Managers. “He was a physician, a leader, and a mentor, whose work was an inspiration to all those whose lives he touched. We hope that by sharing his namesake, this award will serve as a legacy for the many contributions he has made to our industry for many generations to come.”
The award winners were announced at the UHC Annual Conference 2015 in Orlando, Fla, which was attended by nearly 2,000 people, including health care professionals from more than 200 UHC member organizations.
About UHC
Effective April 1, 2015, VHA, the national health care network of not-for-profit hospitals, and UHC, the alliance of the nation’s leading academic medical centers, combined to form the largest member-owned health care company in the country. The combined organization includes Novation, the health care services company already jointly owned by VHA and UHC. The new entity is dedicated to leading health care innovation, creating knowledge, and fostering collaboration to help members thrive.
