Transforming care delivery to focus on patient outcomes.

Although hospital governing boards can have a significant influence over setting priorities and stretch goals and can emphasize an agenda for improving quality and safety, relatively little is known about trustees’ actual level of engagement in quality-related issues. A survey of 1,000 board chairs revealed that less than half of the boards rated quality of care as a top priority, a minority of board members received any formal training, and a gap existed between board activities in high-performing hospitals and low-performing hospitals, according to the 2010 study, conducted by Harvard University researchers Arnold Epstein and Ashish Jha titled “Hospital Governance and the Quality of Care” published in the January 2010 issue of Health Affairs.