We at The Margolin Group enthusiastically congratulate WellPoint on its recent receipt of the prestigious John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award offered by the National Quality Forum and The Joint Commission in recognition of WellPoint’s “Patient Safety First” initiative.
“Patient Safety First … A California Partnership for Health” is a rich example of an alliance that includes the Hospital Council of Northern & Central California, the Hospital Association of Southern California, the Hospital Association of San Diego & Imperial Counties, the National Health Foundation, California hospitals and Anthem Blue Cross – WellPoint’s California-affiliated health plan. By reducing early elective deliveries and hospital-acquired infections, the statewide patient safety collaborative has avoided 3,576 deaths and saved more than $63 million in otherwise unnecessary hospital costs between 2010 and 2012.
Throughout 2009 and 2010, Joanna Horsfall and I were privileged to have WellPoint’s generous financial support and encouragement as we guided the team at Anthem in formulating and launching the first of its kind statewide Patient Safety collaborative. The Eisenberg Award demonstrates that a cooperative, collaborative approach to linking delivery system and payer partners is viable, practical, achievable and impactful.
Organizations across California, representing 95% of the hospitals in the state, were encouraged to band together in common purpose to share with each other their best practices in the arena of patient safety, to share the resources necessary to implement those practices and to enable the hospitals to build the “connective tissue” that guarantees broad-based learning, resource sharing and adoption of proven best practices.
With The Margolin Group’s “Care Innovation Corridors®,” we have built upon the concepts we first developed for Patient Safety First, and we see the Eisenberg Award as confirmation that our approach is a solution to many of the inefficiencies and redundancies that plague our “system” of health care delivery today.
With hearty congratulations to, and deep appreciation for, the hundreds of health care professionals who have worked so hard to make “Patient Safety First” such a stunning and critically important success. Keep up the good work!
Sincerely,
Leslie A. Margolin