Mid-America Transplant was one of two Missouri organizations to receive the 2015 Baldrige Award. They are also a two-time recipient of the Missouri Quality Award.
During the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program’s 28th Annual Quest for Excellence® Conference, Mid-America Transplant now-retired President and CEO Dean Kappel showcased their best practices and shared candid stories of his organization’s “journeys” of improvement using the Baldrige framework.
Highlights from Kappel’s presentation include:
- In 1986, when he joined Mid-America Transplant, Kappel said there were just three employees, now 180, and the budget was under $1 million; today it is somewhere around $40 million.
- The greatest challenge is that from 122 partner hospitals that refer potential donors, there are 30,000 deaths each year. Of those deaths, only 4,400 are medically eligible to be donors, and of those 4,400, only 2,100 actually become donors.
- Today, 120,000 people are waiting for a life-saving transplant in the U.S. This makes each one of these opportunities especially critical.
- Kappel said he spent the 1990s always looking for a better way for how the organization could increase its life-saving results.
- Before receiving the Baldrige Award in 2015, Mid-America Transplant submitted eight Baldrige applications, received five site visits, and was honored with two Missouri Quality Awards.
- It was a presentation from SSM, the first health care organization to receive the Baldrige Award that led Kappel down the path to Baldrige.
- Mid-America’s two core competencies are a mission-driven workforce and an innovative culture.
- With 98% customer satisfaction on its processes, Mid-America has doubled the number of its organ transplants from 300 in the early 2000s to 600 today.
- Due to Kappel’s passion, eight other organ procurement organizations are now electing to adopt the Baldrige Criteria as their own business models.
To learn more about Mid-America Transplant, visit their website.
Read the full summary on Kappel's leadership presentation at Blogridge, the official Baldrige blog, here.