Award honors exceptional organizations

Decatur Memorial has been awarded a 2006 Lincoln Silver Award for Progress Toward Excellence.

Established more than a decade ago, the Lincoln Award for Excellence is an honorary distinction offered by the Lincoln Foundation for Performance Excellence. The award recognizes Illinois organizations that successfully meet standards of excellence based on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria. Awards are given at three levels: bronze, silver and gold. DMH applied for the silver level. Since 1997, only 26 hospitals have been honored: 12 with bronze awards, 12 with silver and two have earned gold.

The Lincoln Foundation for Performance Excellence is a not-for-profit organization backed by private and public funding. The Lincoln Foundation seeks to help Illinois organizations continuously improve their performance by encouraging, developing, and highlighting excellence among all five sectors of the economy: industry, service, health care, education and government. Each year, a select Lincoln Board of Examiners reviews and assesses award applications and a panel of judges determines which applicants have earned recognition. To determine DMH’s eligibility, Lincoln award evaluators spent four days here in August after receiving the hospital’s application in June.

“This award represents a major milestone in our continuing journey to deliver benchmark quality health care to the people of Central Illinois,” says DMH President and CEO Ken Smithmier.

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