Meet America’s Most Innovative Hospitals
Fierce Healthcare announces its 2007 Hospital Innovators Awardees. Friend and client healthcare CEO and pioneering blogger Nick Jacobs runs one of the top five. (It’s no coincidence Nick is presently writing a new book entitled Taking the Hell Out of Healthcare.)
Just announced by Anne Zieger and her team at prestigious industry analysts at FierceHealthcare.com:
“We are pleased to announce the release of our first-annual Hospital Innovators Awards —honoring U.S. acute care hospitals that have taken a leadership role on critical industry issues… These awards honor some of the most innovative acute care hospitals that are stepping outside of ‘business as usual’ and getting special things done. Some are strikingly original, and others are just doing a great job of solving common industry problems.”
Number five on Fierce’s top ten list, Windber Medical Center, is managed by none other than President and CEO F. Nicholas (Nick) Jacobs, freshly returned from the healthcare blogging symposium at Consumer Health World in Las Vegas, produced by Transmarx.
Here are some excerpts from FierceHealthcare’s 2007 award page recognizing Windber Medical Center as one of the top five most innovative hospitals in America.
“What they’re doing: Despite its rural location and small scale, there are some things going on at Windber Medical Center that sit on the cutting edge. Windber’s system…is tying together the work being done by its Windber Research Institute with day-to-day clinical practice. This concept is mostly at the idea stage in most institutions, including high-profile, big-bucks academic medical centers, but Windber is making it happen.”
“Under this concept, known as The Model, patient care teams now include not only physicians and nurses, but also a researcher from the Institute whose job it is to apply what they’re learning in the lab. Researchers draw in part on knowledge gained from the Institute’s 40,000-donor tissue bank, which includes attributes such as gender, age, ethnicity and medical history, to predict what patients may need given the experience of similar donors. It’s a noteworthy strategy–especially for a small facility out in the boonies.”
“What’s more, Windber has jumped into the Planetree model with both feet… As CEO Nick Jacobs puts it, the Planetree philosophy offers patients ‘the best of a spa, best of a hotel and best of a hospital,’ complete with integrative health features such as massage, aroma therapy and Reiki, and comfort options like private kitchens, popcorn and bread making machines for patient’s families, double beds in OB, a greenhouse, healing gardens and decorative fountains. On the less touchy-feely side, this model also gives patients complete access to charts during their stay, giving them chance to ask questions as they see fit. While Planetree has its detractors, it’s hard [not] to argue that Windber is making a great go of it.”
This is actually the second time Windber has received accolades for innovation within the last month. FierceHealthcare’s award comes on the heels of the April 17, 2007 issue of Inside Healthcare Computing, covered in my April 24th post over on Trusted.MD in which Nick, others and myself evangelized for the business value of blogging and other web-based social media for healthcare organizations.
You can read excerpts from Inside Healthcare Computing, or download the complete article (as an Adobe Acrobat/Reader document) here.
So, congratulations to Nick and everyone whose creativity, hard work and innovation earned them Fierce Healthcare’s recognition for clinical excellence.
