The Codman competition: Rewarding excellence in performance measurement, 19 -20.
BACKGROUND
Since 1997 the Ernest Amory Codman Award, the only health care award that recognizes excellence in performance measurement, has honored organizations and individuals for their use of process and outcomes measures to improve organization performance and quality of care.
The individual Codman award winners have advanced measurement of systems performance, health outcomes, and customer satisfaction.
Forty-two organizations have been selected as winners. The work for which these organizations were recognized was categorized as improvements in direct patient care services, improved effectiveness of care through better teamwork, interdisciplinary planning, improvement of administrative processes, and improved quality of care in large regions or health care systems. Case studies from four organizations that have won the Codman award each represents a lesson or theme that may be instructive for other health care organizations--(1) the need for catalysts or agents of change, (2) evidence-based clinical pathways are essential for delivering optimal care to patients in large organizations, (3) quality assessment and improvement methods from other industries can be successfully applied to health care, (4) as health care is increasingly delivered by large networks and systems, quality takes on regional and even national relevance.


CONCLUSIONS
The scope of Codman's endeavors is reflected in the array of quality improvement projects selected as Codman award winners.
Noble
John
J
Center for Primary Care, Boston University School of Medicine, USA. jnoble@bu.edu
D001363:Awards and Prizes; D019091:Critical Pathways; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006302:Health Services Research / Q000592:standards; D006801:Humans; D007591:Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D010043:Outcome and Process Assessment, Health Care / Q000592:standards*; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D011787:Quality of Health Care / Q000592:standards*; D017749:Total Quality Management / Q000592:standards*; D014481:United States