There's really good, and then there's excellent.

That's what receiving the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award means - performance excellence - and next month Poudre Valley Hospital System will be joining an elite group of organizations that have received the award since it was launched in 1988.

Only one other entity in Northern Colorado - the Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business at the University of Northern Colorado - has been a Baldrige honoree, picking up its Baldrige award in 2004.

PVHS was selected for the award last year, one of only three organizations in the nation. But it's taken almost another year to actually collect it. PVHS representatives will travel to Washington, D.C., to accept the award from President Barack Obama in a ceremony to be held Dec. 2.

Rulon Stacey, PVHS president and CEO, said the Baldrige award comes at a time when the public is focused like never before on the quality, accessibility and cost of health care.

"While health-care reform is so high on the national agenda, PVHS has demonstrated an effective and sustainable approach for providing high-quality, low-cost health care," he said. "The Baldrige award is a confirmation for our patients and community that we are truly dedicated to providing world-class health care."

PVHS owns and operates Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins and Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland.

Stacey said the award will honor the accomplishments of PVHS' 4,300 employees, 600 physicians and 900 volunteers.

Achieving the award was by no means guaranteed - and didn't happen overnight. PVHS decided in 1999 to go for the prestigious award and spent the next 10 years working harder every year to earn it, constantly raising its quality parameters and commitment.

Pam Brock, PVHS vice president of marketing, said the decision to seek the award came at a momentous time. "It was a big time of change for Poudre Valley Health System," she said. "We'd gone through five CEOs in four years and we had a 25 percent turnover rate. The organization was struggling, and this was when Rulon first became CEO. He knew we needed something to take the organization to a different place."

Brock said the decision was made in full knowledge that it would not be easy. "We took it on because we knew health care wasn't going to get any easier and we needed to deal with some of the things we were going through at the time."

Along the way, Brock said PVHS learned that Baldrige wasn't about the award but about the improvement that began to be seen every day.

"The thing we learned was the Baldrige award is really about the improvement the organization makes over time, and when staff and our physicians began to see that, we actually got world-class results," she said. "That was a big milestone for us."

It's a feeling that Stacey tries to impart whenever he talks about PVHS and its pursuit of the Baldrige award, Brock noted.

"Rulon says I know there are people alive today because of what we've done with Baldrige," she said. "That's pretty powerful."

Brock said the award's sponsor, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is allowing PVHS to take up to 50 people into the ballroom at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Washington to observe the ceremony. Hospital leaders and board members will be joined by "a few lucky people" from the PVHS staff who won the chance to go along through a lottery.

"They are very thrilled," she said.

Obama is scheduled to make the award presentations to this year's three recipients, which also include Iredell-Statesville school district in North Carolina and Cargill Corn Milling North America in Minnesota.

 

Steve Porter covers health care for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-221-5400, ext. 225, or at sporter@ncbr.com.