While quality as “the degree of excellence” may be third for Webster, it is first for health care. That is especially true of FirstHealth of the Carolinas, where we have incorporated the concept into our 2020 Vision: “Working together, first in quality, first in health.”

An Internet search of the phrase “quality in health care” will turn up the names of any number of international and national organizations (the International Society for Quality in Health Care, the European Society for Quality in Health Care, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the National Association for Healthcare Quality among them). Each is devoted to improving patient safety by improving the quality of patient care.

Closer home, the North Carolina Hospital Association (NCHA) has approached the issue of quality by setting a goal to improve patient safety by reducing medical errors. The effort is led by the Center for Hospital Quality and Patient Safety, an NCHA project that was created to help North Carolina hospitals become the safest and highestquality hospitals in the United States by the year 2010.

This state goal is related to a more immediate initiative of the national Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to save 100,000 patient lives by June 14 of this year. The ambitious project, called the “100,000 Lives Campaign,” has engaged American hospitals in a commitment to prevent avoidable patient deaths.

More than 3,000 hospitals have joined the effort, the first of its kind ever to promote saving a specific number of lives by a specific date. The NCHA was the first state hospital association in the country to link with the IHI goal, and the three FirstHealth hospitals are among the 100-plus NCHA hospitals that are set on helping achieve it.

Our participation in the “100,00 Lives Campaign” builds upon FirstHealth’s historic commitment to quality, one that the founders of the original Moore County Hospital defined in 1929 as an “errand of mercy” and that the current administration augmented in the fall of 2004 with the adoption of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award standards. A little more than a year after our most recent commitment to quality, we were recognized with the North Carolina Awards for Excellence (NCAfE) Commitment (Level 2) Award, an achievement that is based on the Baldrige criteria for quality.

It is now our intention to build on that achievement, and we plan to do it in a variety of ways. This spring, for example, the issue of quality will for the second year in a row take center stage at FirstHealth’s annual board member retreat. Even now, we are working with the physicians at all of our hospitals to better define, measure and improve the indicators of quality that the public will increasingly use to select providers and that Medicare will use to reimburse us. We are also working with the Mid-Carolina Physician Organization to coordinate efforts and broaden the reach of a “culture of quality” into the office setting.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we have added quality to the list of indicators by which we measure our success as an organization. That means that quality is now just as measurable a goal as inpatient discharges, patient satisfaction and cash flow in FirstHealth’s continuing effort to be the health care provider of choice in our region and “to care for people” in the best way possible.

Charles T. Frock
Chief Executive Officer
FirstHealth of the Carolinas