ABSTRACT
Essential to BHCS’s success has been unwavering commitment by the Board of Trustees, as well as administrative and clinical leaders, to quality improvement. The alignment of this leadership triad has facilitated all the other changes instituted at BHCS in pursuit of becoming the “best place to give and receive safe, quality, compassionate health care.” The first deliberate step taken on the BHCS STEEEP quality journey was the quality resolution passed by the Board of Trustees in 2000, establishing the conviction that maintaining the status quo in health care delivery would no longer be acceptable, and setting the stage for the strategic deployment of resources needed to build a quality infrastructure. This early commitment to quality set BHCS ahead of the pack when the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued its seminal report, Crossing the Quality Chasm, the following year,1 but BHCS did not yet have the infrastructure in place to attain its lofty vision. Establishing that infrastructure, and training the necessary leadership in its application to health care improvement has been the work of the decade that followed.
