Today at the helm of Lee Memorial he leads 10,000 employees, 1,200 physicians and 4,000 volunteers. His enterprise is navigating what he calls “the eye of the storm,” referring to the mounting crisis in healthcare funding across the country.

 

Lee Memorial Health System is not only interested in surviving the storm but in being “that great organization,” as Chief Nursing Officer Donna Giannuzzi says, that is recognized locally and nationally as truly great in quality of care and patient safety.

 

In service of this mission, the decision-makers of LMHS decided it needed an accreditation program as efficient and quality-driven as the rest of the organization. Their first conclusion: their traditional, long-running approach was not up to the task. In hearing about the new option from DNV Healthcare, LMHS created an accreditation task force to compare, test and choose which accreditation program would take it into the future. They chose DNV. And just to make sure, they remained accredited to DNV and TJC for a full year. Then decided unanimously to standardize on DNV.