Dr. Don Berwick, center, received the 2011 Picker Award for Excellence on Dec. 5 during the annual Institute for Healthcare Improvement forum. With him are, from right, IHI Executive Direcctor and COO Jeff Selberg; IHI President and CEO Maureen Bisognano; Picker Institute Executive Director Lucile Hanscom; and Picker Board Chairman J. Mark Waxman, Esq.
ORLANDO, Fla.—The Picker Award for Excellence, which recognizes outstanding achievement in promoting and furthering patient-centered care, was awarded to Dr. Don Berwick on Wednesday, Dec. 7, the last day of the 23rd annual national forum hosted by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, which Dr. Berwick cofounded in 1989.
The award cited Dr. Berwick for a “lifetime of unwavering commitment to improving the quality of healthcare for all people worldwide,” and “the uncommon courage that has made him a true leader in the field.”
In presenting the award, Picker Institute Executive Director Lucile O. Hanscom described Dr. Berwick as “a passionate advocate for raising the quality of this country’s healthcare to a new standard of excellence” and as being “in the vanguard of every innovative effort to improve healthcare and the way it is delivered.”
“Ever since the Picker Awards for Excellence were inaugurated in 2003,” said Hanscom, “we’ve taken great pride and pleasure in recognizing people whose dedication to patient- and family-centered care has made them outstanding exemplars of this vital commitment. Don Berwick is just such a person, and his courageous contributions to the field are a beacon whose light illumines and inspires all who believe that the path to achieving a new standard of excellence in healthcare for every single person in this country is to see always through the eyes of the patient to whom it is provided.”
Dr. Berwick, MD, MPP, began his career as a pediatrician at Harvard Community Health Plan. In 1983 he became the plan’s first Vice President of Quality-of-Care Measurement, in which capacity he investigated quality-control measures in other industries such as
aeronautics and manufacturing and considered their application in healthcare settings.
In 1987, Dr. Berwick co-founded the National Demonstration Project on Quality Improvement in Health Care, designed to explore opportunities for quality improvement in healthcare. He served as co-principal investigator for the project until 1991. In accord with his work with the project, Dr. Berwick left Harvard Community Health Plan in 1989 and co-founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
In April 2010 Dr. Berwick was named by Pres. Barack Obama as administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He stepped down from the post in late November 2011.
Dr. Berwick graduated from Harvard College with a BA. He received an MPP from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and an MD from Harvard Medical School. He completed his medical residency at Children’s Hospital, Boston.
Dr. Berwick has received many awards, including the Ernest A. Codman Award in 1999; the Alfred I. DuPont Award for Excellence in Children’s Healthcare, 2001; the American Hospital Association’s “Award of Honor,” 2002; the Purpose Prize for “enlisting wide-scale cooperation and scientifically proven protocols to help hospitals improve care
and save more than 100,000 lives,” 2007; and the 13th Annual Heinz Award for Public Policy, 2007.
He was named a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London in 2004 and Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2005.
Dr. Berwick has published more than 130 articles in professional journals on healthcare policy, decision analysis, technology assessment and healthcare quality management. He is the co-author of several books, including Cholesterol, Children, and Heart Disease: an
Analysis of Alternatives (1980), Curing Health Care (1990) and New Rules: Regulation, Markets and the Quality of American Health Care (1996).
Read Dr. Berwick’s address at the Picker Award event, “The Moral Test,” here.
The book, by David Farrell, MSW, LNHA, Cathie Brady, MS, and Barbara Frank, MPA, and supported by Picker Institute, is “a must read for nursing home administrators, directors of nursing and others in leadership positions in long-term care. It offers practical, commonsense, easy-to-implement approaches that will yield immediate positive results. It also serves as a wake-up call to leaders who doubt their impact, and as an affirmation to leaders who struggle daily to do a good job.”