Leadership and management principles for outcomes-oriented organizations.

Outcomes and effectiveness research has provided a wealth of information about interventions that can improve patient experience and outcomes. The challenges facing healthcare leaders today highlight the need for new research on how leadership and management principles can enable healthcare providers and systems to deploy this knowledge swiftly and effectively. The Baldrige National Quality Program (BNQP) is an education and award program established by the U.S. Congress in 1987 that supports American businesses seeking to improve product and service quality, customer and workforce satisfaction, efficiency, financial results, and overall capacity to perform and respond to changing circumstances. Award recipients show a constellation of strengths that suggest that certain basic leadership and management practices are correlated with a fundamental ability to achieve desired results. This article describes characteristics of highly effective organizations based on a review of Baldrige Award recipients, focuses on the application of these characteristics to healthcare settings, illustrates their application with best practices from SSM Health Care, the first-ever healthcare recipient in 2002, and presents several priorities for outcomes and effectiveness research to inform healthcare leadership and administration.