Quality and Patient Safety Award (New in 2024)
At UnitedHealth Group, we believe that Quality is everyone’s responsibility. Quality means we strive for excellence in everything that we do. In Clinical Quality and Patient Safety, this Quality belief is an essential commitment to achieving our goal of eliminating harm and achieving optimal clinical quality outcomes.
This award recognizes individual clinicians, or a clinician who has partnered with another clinician or UHG employee on a project to improve quality and/or safety. Winners will demonstrate our UnitedHealth Group values in one or more of the following categories:
1. Quality
Demonstrating success in clinical quality outcomes (i.e. by doing the right thing, for the right patient, at the right time, in the right way) to achieve the best possible results. Nominations for this category should include an overview of the problem, intervention, results, and impact.
2. Patient Safety
Taking actions to improve patient safety by promoting a culture of safety1 in at least one of the following areas:
- Just culture – fostering an environment where employees are encouraged, even rewarded for providing essential safety-related information and clear lines are drawn between human error, at-risk and reckless behavior.
- Reporting culture – ensuring employees report their errors and near misses.
- Learning culture – drawing the right conclusions from safety information systems, and the will to implement major reforms when there is need.
3. High Reliability Organization Characteristics
- Advancing our organization’s journey to High Reliability, which is the sustained pursuit of excellent performance under complex and dynamic conditions. The five characteristics of high reliability organizations2 include:
- Preoccupation with Failure –This includes focusing on errors and near misses, learning from them, and figuring out how to prevent them from happening again.
- Reluctance to Simplify – The acceptance that our organization is complex, with a potential to fail in new and unexpected ways. This means resisting broad excuses and digging deeply to identify root causes of poor performance.
- Sensitivity to Operations – Having heightened awareness of the state of relevant systems and processes and what is or isn’t working by using data, feedback, and listening.
- Commitment to Resilience – Being prepared to respond swiftly to unexpected events or errors by working in teams, removing barriers, and leaning into new solutions swiftly.
- Deference to Expertise – Valuing insights from staff with the most pertinent quality and safety knowledge over those with greater seniority.