In the U.S. health care system, quality and safety have developed into strategically important issues. Progress is being made at the local level, even if it is slow and doesn’t get much of the public’s attention. Health care improvement has certainly come a long way since the early 1990s, when an improvement resolution took shape, thanks in part to the efforts of the National Demonstration Project on Quality Improvement in Healthcare, with Dr. Don Berwick (then from Harvard Community Health) and Blanton Godfrey, CEO of Juran Institute. Organizations today are more open to improvement, and to the importance of managing quality.

In 2002, the Midwest Business Group on Health and I conducted one of the first cost-of-poor-quality benchmarks for health care in the United States. Since then, many hospitals have begun to drive down costs while improving outcomes.

Today, the work continues. A number of health care systems have won national quality awards, and hundreds of hospitals are pursuing the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest recognition for organizational performance excellence through innovation and improvement.

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