December 12, 2013

Otolaryngology lands performance excellence award

The Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence (TNCPE) is awarding Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center’s Department of Otolaryngology with its Commitment Award in the annual Excellence in Tennessee recognition program.

The Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence (TNCPE) is awarding Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center’s Department of Otolaryngology with its Commitment Award in the annual Excellence in Tennessee recognition program.

TNCPE is the only statewide quality program and is patterned on the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, the national standard for recognizing organizational excellence.

The award will be presented at the 21st annual Excellence in Tennessee Awards Banquet on Feb. 19, 2014.

“We are excited for our faculty and staff to receive recognition for the great number of accomplishments achieved over the past few years,” said Mack Howell, director of Operations and Finance for the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center.

“The department plans to use this award and the feedback provided to focus on ways to improve our organization. We recognize health care entities will need to be creative, results-oriented and more efficient as we continue to work through challenging times.”

Through an annual evaluation and assessment process, TNCPE recognizes high-performance organizations exhibiting continuous improvement and best practice processes.

More than 1,200 organizations have participated in and benefited from the TNCPE program. This year, TNCPE has named 26 organizations as 2013 award winners representing outstanding achievement in the health care, manufacturing, service, education, government and nonprofit sectors.

Organizations apply to the TNCPE program at one of four levels. As the levels increase, so does the depth and complexity of the application, which is based on the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence.

Only 22 organizations have attained the Excellence designation since the program was founded in 1993. Mountain States Health Alliance will receive the Excellence Award this year, and six organizations will be honored with the Achievement Award. Eighteen organizations, including Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center, will receive a Commitment Award, and one will receive the Interest Recognition.

Awards are presented to organizations that are beginning to demonstrate commitment and implementation of performance improvement principles. They have demonstrated progress by identifying and putting in place a measurement system to capture data and analyze results, while some key process improvements are directly attributable to a fact-based improvement process.

A full list of winners can be found on the TNCPE website www.tncpe.org.