Chair File: Recognizing Leadership and Innovation in Health Care Quality

More than 20 years ago, the Institute of Medicine — now the National Academy of Medicine — defined quality in health care across six aims: safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and patient-centered.

Each year, the AHA Quest for Quality Prize recognizes hospitals and health systems that have committed to and are making significant progress toward providing exceptional care to patients based on those six “STEEEP” aims.

Main Line Health in Bryn Mawr, Pa., is the 2023 recipient of the AHA Quest for Quality Prize. Receiving Citations of Merit are Atlantic Health System in Morristown, N.J., and University of Chicago Medicine in Chicago. Leaders from all three organizations received their awards during a presentation at the AHA Leadership Summit last week.

These health care organizations have demonstrated innovative models of care, services and collaboration to provide excellent care to all patients and families.

• Main Line Health was selected for its systemwide integration of quality, safety and equity and for the governing and operating structures supporting these goals. The leadership team at Main Line Health demonstrates engagement and a depth of knowledge about achieving quality goals. Clinical environment workgroups support alignment across the health system, and unit-based councils enable front-line staff to participate in quality improvement activities. A systemwide dashboard monitors STEEEP metrics, and annual team goals are aligned to the STEEEP domains.
• Atlantic Health System established the Atlantic COVID Recovery Center, a multispecialty, interdisciplinary, longitudinal program designed to evaluate and treat patients with persistent COVID-19 symptoms. This innovative initiative led to the creation of a regional network of primary care physicians who follow these patients.
• University of Chicago Medicine has worked to identify and eliminate disparities in care and outcomes for Black mothers and babies, with strong results. The health system has a community council as well as working groups focused on maternal and child health, trauma care and violence prevention, and adult health.

Read more about these organizations’ outstanding work in quality performance improvement in the AHA publication.

Your organization can be recognized as a quality leader too. Visit AHA.org to download the 2024 application — and apply as a hospital or a system. Submissions are due Sept. 12.

Congratulations to this year’s AHA Quest for Quality Prize recipients for exceptional leadership and innovation improving quality and advancing health.