Abstract
Healthcare expenditures represent a substantial aspect of the overall American economy. As a result, increasing pressure is being exerted upon virtually every organization in the healthcare sector to improve its performance. The goal of this research was to examine the core value adoption in American hospitals and its relationship to hospital safety. In addition, differences in core value usage between quality award-winning hospitals and non-award-winning hospitals were examined. Primary data were collected from 108
Minnesota hospitals and 17 quality award-winning hospitals. Secondary safety data were assembled from the Leapfrog database. The key findings in this study show that hospitals have widely varying abilities in implementing core values. Further, core values present differing levels of difficulty for the hospitals that are trying to accomplish them. The authors’ findings also indicate that the ability to adopt core values is related to the overall safety. The principal conclusions are that the Baldrige core values exist in the form of a hierarchy within hospitals. Further, a hospital’s ability to successfully adopt any particular core value is a function of its existing capabilities.