Winning the Baldrige Award: How the Henry Ford Health System Undertook a Five‐Year Improvement Process

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21088
• Author: Brooke Dziurman,Jordan Sprague,Michael D. Witt,Gannon O'Reilly
• Date: 01 December 2013
• Published date: 01 December 2013

FROM THE FIELD

Winning the Baldrige Award

How the Henry Ford Health

System Undertook a Five-Year

Improvement Process

Gannon O’Reilly, Brooke Dziurman,

Jordan Sprague, Michael D. Witt

University of Michigan–Flint

Henry Ford Health Systems (HFHS) won the 2011 Baldrige

Award, a major accomplishment. This achievement resulted

from a systemwide focus on minimizing and controlling medi-

cal errors, a cultural shift to stimulate innovation and creative

problem solving, and service excellence at every level. The five-

year effort centered on meeting Baldrige Award criteria, typi-

cally utilized in the for-profit setting. When applied to the

nonprofit sector, HFHS managed to reduce costs, reduce medi-

cation and treatment errors, introduce multiple creative clinical

programs, and launch a new Ritz Carlton-quality, hotel-style

service.

Keywords: health, innovation, leadership, management

INITIATED BY THE WHITE House through the Department of Com-

merce, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award acknowl-

edges the highest level of performance excellence for any

business within the United States, for-profit and nonprofit alike.

Xerox, Ritz-Carlton, and Boeing are among some of the most nota-

ble past awardees. Today, the Henry Ford Health System (HFHS)

can list itself among them as the recipient of the 2011 Malcolm

Correspondence to: Michael D. Witt, University of Michigan–Flint, School of

Management, 303 E. Kearsley St., Riverfront Place, Flint, MI 48433. E-mail:

mdwitt@umflint.edu

NONPROFIT MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP, vol. 24, no. 2, Winter 2013 © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc 249

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nml.21088