2016 Baldrige Award Winners Announced
"This year's honorees are trailblazers in innovation, small business, health care, and sustainable textiles. Their visionary leadership is helping to power the economy and increase our ability to compete globally," Pritzker said. "The Commerce Department proudly supports these four outstanding organizations for their unwavering commitment to performance excellence and their dedication to always reaching higher."
U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker on Nov. 17 announced four organizations are the 2016 winners of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which is the nation's highest presidential honor for sustainable excellence through visionary leadership, organizational alignment, systemic improvement and innovation. The winners are two small businesses and two health care providers from four states in these categories:
- Don Chalmers Ford, Rio Rancho, N.M. (small business)
- Momentum Group, Irvine, Calif. (small business)
- Kindred Nursing and Rehabilitation Center -- Mountain Valley, Kellogg, Idaho (health care)
- Memorial Hermann Sugar Land Hospital, Sugar Land, Texas (health care)
"This year's honorees are trailblazers in innovation, small business, health care, and sustainable textiles. Their visionary leadership is helping to power the economy and increase our ability to compete globally," Pritzker said. "The Commerce Department proudly supports these four outstanding organizations for their unwavering commitment to performance excellence and their dedication to always reaching higher."
The department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) manages the Baldrige Award in cooperation with the private sector. An organization may compete for the award in one of six categories: manufacturing, service, small business, health care, education, and nonprofit (including government agencies). "We are particularly excited about the diversity of the organizations being recognized this year," said Robert Fangmeyer, director of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. "Like those before them, the 2016 honorees have created robust processes and cultures that focus on benefitting their customers, workforce and communities, and in doing so, have achieved outstanding operational and business results."
So far, more than 1,600 U.S. organizations have applied for the Baldrige Award, and during 2010-2014 more than 4 million copies of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, the core of the Baldrige Framework, were distributed.
According to NIST, Momentum Group was the first in its industry to offer a full textile product line of reduced environmental-impact fabrics; Kindred Nursing and Rehabilitation Center—Mountain Valley has achieved a five-star quality rating from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid for seven consecutive years; and Memorial Hermann Sugar Land Hospital ranks among the top 10 percent nationally for a number of performance metrics, including emergency center arrival-to-discharge time, compliance with regulations to reduce medication errors, bed turnaround times, radiology and laboratory result turnaround times, and the use of computerized physician order entry.
The Baldrige recognized six other organizations for best practices in one or more of the Baldrige Criteria categories:
- City of Fort Collins, Fort Collins, Colo.—leadership
- Kaiser Permanente San Diego—leadership
- Maury Regional Medical Center, Columbia, Tenn.—leadership
- Duke University Hospital, Durham, N.C.—leadership and strategy
- Park Place Lexus of Texas, Plano, Texas—customers
- Southern Management Corporation, Vienna, Va.—workforce
The 2016 Baldrige Awards will be presented in April 2017 during the Quest for Excellence conference in Baltimore.