Overview

This case study first appeared in the report Brigham and Women's Hospital: "Moving the Needle" Takes People, Processes, and Leadership by Jennifer Edwards, Dr.P.H.

Brigham and Women's Hospital is a 777-bed nonprofit, teaching hospital located in Boston, Massachusetts. Scores on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey show that it is a leading hospital nationally on measures of patient satisfaction. Since 2002, the hospital has followed three strategies to improve patient satisfaction: allocating significant new funding for quality measurement and process improvement work, including establishing a Center for Clinical Excellence; developing a management information system for hospital leaders that tracks patient and family experiences, along with other hospital performance indicators; and seeking to enhance patients' experiences by working with frontline staff, including implementing new recruitment, training, management, and improvement strategies.

Disclaimer

The case study or studies included in this Fund report were based on publicly availableinformation and self-reported data provided by the case study institution(s). The aim of Fund-sponsored case studies of this type is to identify institutions that have achieved results indicating high performance in a particular area, have undertaken innovations designed to reach higher performance, or exemplify attributes that can foster high performance. The studies are intended to enable other institutions to draw lessons from the studied organizations' experiences in ways that may aid their own efforts to become high performers. The Commonwealth Fund is not an accreditor of health care organizations or systems, and the inclusion of an institution in the Fund's case studies series is not an endorsement by the Fund for receipt of health care from the institution.