Washington, DC (March 13, 2012) — The National Quality Forum (NQF) and The Joint Commission today announced the 2011 recipients of the annual John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Awards. The awards will be presented on April 5, 2012 during a luncheon at the 2012 NQF Annual Conference and Membership Meeting in Washington, DC.
The patient safety awards program, launched in 2002 by NQF and The Joint Commission, honors John M. Eisenberg, M.D., M.B.A., former administrator of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Dr. Eisenberg was one of the founding leaders of NQF and sat on its Board of Directors. In his roles both as AHRQ administrator and chair of the federal government’s Quality Inter-Agency Coordination Task Force, he was a passionate advocate for patient safety and health care quality and personally led AHRQ’s grant program to support patient safety research.
The honorees, selected in three award categories, are:
INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT
Kenneth I. Shine, M.D. - University of Texas
Dr. Shine is being recognized for his multiple leadership roles that have helped to improve quality and safety in health care nationwide. Over the course of his tenure as President of the Institute of Medicine, Dr. Shine established the Quality of Care in America Project which led to the landmark reports, “To Err is Human” and “Crossing the Quality Chasm,” helping to put safety and quality on the national agenda. As the founding Director of the RAND Center for Domestic and International Health Security, he led the Center's efforts to make health a central component of U.S. foreign policy and guide the Center's evolving research agenda. In 2003, Dr. Shine joined the University of Texas Medical System as the Executive Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs. In this role, Dr. Shine helped to place quality and safety at the forefront of care, enacting change on a system-wide scale. A cardiologist and physiologist, he received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1961, and an A.B. in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College in 1957.
INNOVATION IN PATIENT SAFETY AND QUALITY AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL
The Society of Hospital Medicine, Philadelphia, PA
The Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) is recognized for its Mentored Implementation model, designed to further frontline quality initiatives. By employing a mentor, typically a hospitalist-expert in quality improvement and other relevant content, hospital teams are provided with the guidance they need to implement best practices and improve quality more rapidly. In addition to sharing best practices, participants are able to better engage effective measurement of baseline status and progress to date, and foster leadership skills in the process. To date, SHM’s mentors are in place in over 300 hospitals around the U.S. and Canada in three signature quality improvement initiatives focusing on care transitions, glycemic control, and venous thromboembolism prevention.
INNOVATION IN PATIENT SAFETY AND QUALITY AT THE LOCAL LEVEL
New York-Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY
An innovative collaboration between the housestaff, the Department of Anesthesiology, the Division of Quality and Patient Safety, the Office of Graduate Medical Education, and support from senior hospital administration resulted in the creation of the first Housestaff Quality Council © (HQC) at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in 2008. Since its creation, the HQC has promoted greater housestaff participation in quality and patient safety initiatives at the hospital by partnering with key constituencies to ensure that processes and systems are in place to avoid medical errors. Key successes include attaining a greater than 90% compliance with medication reconciliation and reduction in the use of paper laboratory orders, in favor of electronic orders, by more than 70%.
Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, MI
In 2008, the Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) launched its No Harm Campaign, designed to integrate harm reduction interventions into a system-wide initiative and eliminate harm from the health care experience. The campaign aims to decrease harm events through enhancing the system’s culture of safety by reporting and studying harm events, researching causality, identifying priorities, redesigning care to eliminate harm, and employing a comprehensive set of measures across their facilities. From April 2008-June 2011, using the defined set of measures which has expanded over time, a 26% reduction in harm events and 12% reduction in mortality occurred system-wide.
HONORARY LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Jerod M. Loeb, Ph.D., The Joint Commission, Oakbrook Terrace, IL
In addition to the 2011 honorees selected for this year’s Eisenberg Awards, the jury panel chose to recognize the extraordinary and sustained contributions to health care quality and patient safety of Dr. Jerod M. Loeb, executive vice president, Division of Healthcare Quality Evaluation, The Joint Commission, in the form of an Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award.
Dr. Loeb is being recognized for his leadership in The Joint Commission’s performance measurement initiative. Since his arrival at The Joint Commission in 1994, he has played a leadership role in identifying, evaluating and implementing performance measures across the wide variety of Joint Commission accreditation and certification programs. He is involved in a variety of national and international initiatives associated with performance measurement and patient safety, including those of the National Quality Forum, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the International Society for Quality in Health Care, and the World Health Organization. His work has resulted in thousands of hospitals and health care organizations realizing the importance of accurate, focused performance measurement in driving quality improvement, paving the way for federal performance measurement requirements that continue to be rolled out today. Dr. Loeb received his Ph.D. in cardiovascular physiology in 1977 from the State University of New York – Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, and a Bachelor of Science in Biology (with honors) from the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, in 1971.
Dr. Loeb’s other life passion is fire, police, and emergency medical services. In 1998, he began volunteering his time with the Buffalo Grove, Illinois Fire Department, and since 2005, has an official State of Illinois municipal appointment as Fire and Police Commissioner for his suburban community of 45,000 in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.
“The Eisenberg Award recipients provide inspiration in national efforts to create a highly reliable health care system,” says Mark R. Chassin, M.D., FACP, M.P.P., M.P.H., president, The Joint Commission. “We applaud their commitment and their courage in making health care safer.”
“This year’s recipients truly exemplify the spirit of this award program,” said Janet Corrigan, Ph.D., M.B.A., president and CEO, NQF. “Their innovative contributions to health care quality and safety will have a lasting impact. These efforts save lives, inspire leadership, and serve as a beacon to other learning organizations that want to deliver safe, effective care 100 percent of the time.”
This year's John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Awards will be presented during a lunch session on April 5, 2012 at NQF's Annual Conference and Membership Meeting in Washington, DC. Focused on the theme, “Building a Patient- and Family-Centered Health System,” the agenda includes an opening keynote from Jessie Gruman, PhD, president and founder of the Center for Advancing Health. In her remarks, Dr. Gruman will share her perspective on our current healthcare system “through the patient’s eyes,” and recommendations for how to make the system more patient and family centered.
Additional sessions for the day-long program include:
- Policy Initiatives: The Patient-Centered Outcomes Institute
- Policy Initiatives: Making Care Seamless
- Patient Centered Healthcare Delivery: Would We Know It if We Saw It?
- Health Information Technology and Patient Engagement
- The Challenges of Measurement
The closing keynote, “Using Patient-Centered Measures to Transform Healthcare Delivery,” will be delivered by Ziad Haydar, M.D., M.B.A., chief medical officer, Ascension Health. Dr. Haydar will address how a leading-edge system successfully uses patient-centered measurement tools to encourage more substantive, meaningful patient and family engagement and how these instruments can help improve care delivery.
A detailed agenda and additional information about the event, including registration, is available online.
The June 2012 issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety also will feature the achievements of each of the award recipients.
###
Founded in 1951, The Joint Commission seeks to continuously improve health care for the public, in collaboration with other stakeholders, by evaluating health care organizations and inspiring them to excel in providing safe and effective care of the highest quality and value. The Joint Commission evaluates and accredits more than 19,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States, including more than 10,300 hospitals and home care organizations, and more than 6,500 other health care organizations that provide long term care, behavioral health care, laboratory and ambulatory care services. The Joint Commission currently certifies more than 2,000 disease-specific care programs, focused on the care of patients with chronic illnesses such as stroke, joint replacement, stroke rehabilitation, heart failure and many others. The Joint Commission also provides health care staffing services certification for more than 750 staffing offices. An independent, not-for-profit organization, The Joint Commission is the nation's oldest and largest standards-setting and accrediting body in health care. Learn more about The Joint Commission at www.jointcommission.org.
The National Quality Forum (NQF) operates under a three-part mission to improve the quality of American healthcare by:
- Building consensus on national priorities and goals for performance improvement and working in partnership to achieve them;
- Endorsing national consensus standards for measuring and publicly reporting on performance; and
- Promoting the attainment of national goals through education and outreach programs.
Learn more at: www.qualityforum.org
