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HealthPartners Wins NQF's 2007 National Quality Healthcare Award
January 29, 2007
WASHINGTON, D.C., - The National Quality Forum announced today that HealthPartners, a Minnesota-based integrated care delivery system, has been selected as the 14th recipient of the National Quality Forum (NQF) annual National Quality Healthcare Award. The NQF award is conducted in partnership with Modern Healthcare magazine and is underwritten by the Cardinal Health Foundation.
The jury-reviewed award recognizes a healthcare organization for its proactive and exemplary response to the national call for quality improvement and accountability by successfully using performance measurement to drive improvements in quality and efficiency and fostering a culture of transparency and accountability to patients and the community.
"We are very pleased to name HealthPartners the recipient of the 2007 Award," said Janet Corrigan, Ph.D., NQF's President and CEO. "This organization raises the bar for health system performance and is truly a role model for making quality improvement and public reporting the centerpiece of the health system's mission and business model."
"We are honored to receive national recognition for our commitment to quality improvement and public reporting," said Mary Brainerd, HealthPartners President and CEO. "As a not-for-profit organization, our mission is to improve the health of our members, our patients and the community. Our focus is simple: to transform health care. We work hard to offer care that is safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and patient-centered throughout our organization and to be responsive and accountable to our community. It means a great deal to us to be recognized by the National Quality Forum for this work and it is a great inspiration to all of us at HealthPartners to continue our effort."
An 18-person jury participated in a "blinded" review of applications from a wide range of organizations to select this year's winner. The jury used a uniform set of scoring criteria to evaluate the extent to which the applicant's approach to performance improvement was systematic, well-deployed, effective, innovative, sustainable and replicable.
Gary Gottlieb, MD, President and CEO of Brigham and Women's Hospital, last year's recipient of the Award, and Chair of the 2007 Jury Panel said, "The award attracted a very strong set of applicants this year, but one stood out for its clear, systematic approach to quality improvement and extraordinary commitment to transparency and community involvement. Seeing this level of excellence in such a large and multi-faceted organization made it particularly remarkable."
The National Quality Healthcare Award was created in 1993 by the National Committee for Quality Health Care and is the first award of its kind to recognize outstanding quality-driven healthcare organizations. For 14 years, the Award has provided encouragement for improvements in quality through public recognition of organizations' accomplishments. The first award went to The Henry Ford Health System (Detroit) in 1994; other prominent prior recipients include Intermountain Healthcare (1996), St. Luke's Hospital of Kansas City (1997) (which went on to receive one of the first Baldrige Awards in healthcare), Northwestern Memorial HealthCare (2005), and Brigham and Women's Hospital (2006). The Award moved to the National Quality Forum (NQF) as a result of the 2006 merger with the National Committee for Quality Health Care.
NQF will host a gala reception on March 8, 2007 in Washington, D.C. to present the award to HealthPartners. The event is open to the press; please contact Lauren Murray at lmurray@qualityforum.org for more information.
The mission of the National Quality Forum is to improve the quality of American healthcare by setting national priorities and goals for performance improvement, endorsing national consensus standards for measuring and publicly reporting on performance, and promoting the attainment of national goals through education and outreach programs. NQF, a non-profit organization (www.qualityforum.org) with diverse stakeholders across the public and private health sectors, was established in 1999 and is based in Washington, DC.
National Quality Forum 601 13th St., NW, Washington, DC 20005. (202)783.1300 www.qualityforum.org
The Cardinal Health Foundation is the corporate sponsor of the 2007 NQF National Quality Healthcare Award. Supported by the global resources of Cardinal Health (www.cardinal.com), the Cardinal Health Foundation is the focal point of the company's community relations efforts. The Foundation's mission is to advance and fund regional and national programs that improve access to and delivery of quality health care services.
About HealthPartners
Founded in 1957, the HealthPartners (www.healthpartners.com) family of healthcare companies serve more than one million medical and dental health plan members nationwide. It is the largest consumer-governed, nonprofit health care organization in the nation, providing care, coverage, research and education to improve the health of members, patients and the community. For the third year in a row, HealthPartners is rated one of the best commercial health plans in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, NCQA's "America's Best Health Plans 2007" and is ranked "Highest in Member Satisfaction among Commercial Health Plans in the Minnesota-Wisconsin Region" by J.D. Power and Associates.
NQF Contact: Jerry Mullins
Phone: 202-974-8305
Email: jmullins@webermerritt.com
HealthPartners Contact: 952 883-5223
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