In 2004, Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital launched a journey to performance excellence which we called Moving from Good to Great. The strategic intention of our journey was to become the ‘best place for physicians to practice, employees to work and patients to receive care.’  During the initial two years of our work, we achieved many breakthroughs in our clinical and service outcomes and also began to make progress on our aspiration to become a preferred workplace for our employees and physicians.

By mid-2006, however, we realized that our ability to ensure a sustainable organization would require the construction of a more process-driven, and less person-dependent, culture of performance. The next logical step was to embrace the Baldrige approach to performance excellence.

Adopting the Baldrige approach, however, with its heavy reliance on process design, deployment, and improvement is not an easy transition for senior leaders. To aid this transition, and accelerate the journey to predictable excellence, we found the Baldrige User’s Guide to be a great roadmap. The dozens of excellent process examples within the User’s Guide provides greater clarity of the criteria and how to specifically apply it to any organization.  I am proud that many of Good Samaritan’s processes are highlighted in this 5th edition.

David Fox

President

Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital                   

Baldrige Recipient 2010 (Healthcare)

John Latham and John Vinyard (c) 2003 - 2010

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