The Baldrige Health Care Criteria provide a systems perspective for managing your organization and its key processes to achieve results—and to strive for performance excellence. The seven Baldrige Criteria Categories, the Core Values, and the Scoring Guidelines form the building blocks and the integrating mechanism for the system. However, successful management of overall performance requires organization-specific synthesis, alignment, and integration. Synthesis means looking at your organization as a whole and builds on key organizational attributes, including your core competencies, strategic objectives, action plans, and work systems. Alignment means using the key linkages among requirements given in the Baldrige Criteria Categories to ensure consistency of plans, processes, measures, and actions. Integration builds on alignment, so that the individual components of your performance management system operate in a fully interconnected manner and deliver anticipated results.

These concepts are depicted in the Baldrige Criteria framework. A systems perspective includes your senior leaders’ focus on strategic directions and on your patients and stakeholders. It means that your senior leaders monitor, respond to, and manage performance based on your results. A systems perspective also includes using your measures, indicators, core competencies, and organizational knowledge to build your key strategies. It means linking these strategies with your work systems and key processes and aligning your resources to improve your overall performance and your focus on patients and stakeholders.

Thus, a systems perspective means managing your whole organization, as well as its components, to achieve success.