Did you know ...

• The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is America's highest honor for performance excellence awarded annually by the President of the United States.
• The U.S. Congress passed the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act of 1987 (Public Law 100-107) to enhance the competitiveness of U.S. businesses in an ever-expanding, demanding, highly competitive global market.
• Named after the 26th Secretary of Commerce, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program was created to: promote performance excellence, identify and recognize role models, establish criteria for evaluating improvement, disseminate and share best practices.
• Malcolm Baldrige was the Secretary of Commerce from 1981 until his tragic death from a rodeo accident in 1987. He was a proponent of quality management as key to U.S. prosperity and he drafted the earliest version of the quality improvement act that lead to the Baldrige program.
• Over 1000 applications have been submitted as part of the Baldrige program since it began in 1988.
• There have been 71 awards presented to 67 organizations with four organizations receiving the recognition twice (Solectron Corp., The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co., Texas Nameplate Co. Inc., Sunny Fresh Foods).
• A total of 161 applications have been submitted by healthcare organizations since the healthcare criteria became available in 1999. There have been six award recipients in healthcare including: SSM Healthcare (St. Louis, MO), Baptist Hospital, Inc. (Pensacola, FL), St. Luke's Hospital (Kansas City, MO), Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (Hamilton, NJ), Bronson Methodist Hospital (Kalamazoo, MI), and North Mississippi Medical Center (Tupelo, MS).
• Bronson is the first healthcare organization to be awarded the recognition on the first site visit.
• There have been two award recipients from the state of Michigan: Cadillac Motor Car Company (1990) and Bronson Methodist Hospital (2005).
• The Baldrige program encourages continuous organizational improvement; therefore, award recipients are eligible to reapply after five years.
• Recipients are evaluated rigorously by an independent board of examiners in seven categories: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; human resource focus; process management; and results. The evaluation process includes over 1,000 hours of review and an on-site visit by teams of examiners to clarify questions and verify information in the application.
• The most valuable component of the application process is the extensive feedback report highlighting strengths and opportunities for improvement. It is a very cost effective organizational assessment provided by trained experts.