2008 Individual Nomination Form
Potential Individual Award candidates are health care professionals who have been substantively engaged in the development and testing of performance measures; those who have made major contributions to the science and art of quality improvement; and those who have played significant leadership roles in promoting the use of performance measures to improve health care services. Thumbnail sketches of the previous Individual Award recipients are also appended to the nomination form.
As with the Codman Awards for health care organizations, review of the Individual Award nominees will be overseen by our Codman Award Evaluation Committee. The Evaluation Committee, which is composed of national experts in performance measurement and quality improvement, will make its final recommendation to the Executive Committee of the Joint Commission’s Board of Commissioners this coming fall.
2008 Individual Nomination Form
The 2008 Codman Individual Award Nominations deadline is July 7, 2008
Previous Individual Codman Award Recipients
2007 Individual Award Winner
The winner of the 2007 Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award was Dr .John E. Wennberg. Dr. Wennberg’s pioneering research of the past 30 years has focused on regional variations in medical care, outcomes of medical treatment and shared decision-making. He was among the first researchers to document that variations in medical treatment patterns affect the cost and quality of patient care and are due primarily to physician treatment styles. Dr. Wennberg helped shape the legislation that established the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research - now known as the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ) - by attracting Congressional attention to outcomes research. The results of his research have led policymakers, health care providers and consumers to more closely examine the appropriateness and cost-effectiveness of patient care.
2006 Individual Award Winners
The winner of the 2006 Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award was Brent James, M.D., M. Stat. Dr. James has contributed substantially to health care quality improvement efforts through his work in clinical medicine, biostatistics, and health services research. As executive director of the Institute for Health Care Delivery Research and vice president for medical research and continuing medical education at Intermountain Healthcare, Dr. James has led pioneering efforts to put usable quality improvement and measurement tools into the hands of clinicians. This work has been widely imitated both in the United States and abroad and has had substantial impacts in improving the quality and safety of patient care. His cutting-edge contributions further include the development of physician-level performance measures under the aegis of the American Medical Association’s Performance Measures Advisory Committee. Dr. James has also led an applied research center as part of the development of the National Committee for Quality Assurance’s comprehensive diabetes care measures, now widely used to evaluate the quality of diabetes care.
An honorary Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award was bestowed on Dennis O’Leary, M.D., President of the Joint Commission. Seen as a visionary in using performance measurement to improve health care, he successfully led the transformation of the Joint Commission’s accreditation process to focus on actual organization performance in the provision of patient care. This transformation set the stage for the progressive introduction of care-related outcomes and process measures. He has also overseen the introduction of cutting-edge standards relating to patient safety, pain management, use of patient restraints, and emergency preparedness. In recent years, Dr. O’Leary has spearheaded the launching of a series of Joint Commission public policy initiatives that have addressed the nurse staffing crisis, health professions educational reform, the nexus between patient safety and the tort system, and the health literacy problem, among other quality and safety-related issues.
2005 Individual Award Winner
The winner of the 2005 Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award was Kenneth W. Kizer, M.D. M.P.H. Dr. Kizer is a passionate advocate for performance improvement, the public reporting of performance and the use of measurement to improve the quality of health care. As President of the National Quality Forum, he led efforts to establish consensus-based standards for performance measurement that should be used in making meaningful determinations about the safety and quality of health care. As the Under Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) from 1994 to 1999, Dr. Kizer was the highest ranking physician in the federal government and the chief executive officer of the veterans health care system where he transformed the manner in which care is delivered and performance is measured in the VA. Today, the VA is recognized as a model of excellence in health care delivery as a direct consequence of Dr. Kizer’s efforts.
2004 Individual Award Winner
The winner of the 2004 Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award was Stephen F. Jencks, M.D., M.P.H. For more than a decade, Dr. Jencks has led the initiatives of the federal government to use quality measures to improve care for the nearly 40 million Americans enrolled in the Medicare program. Currently the Quality Coordinator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Dr. Jencks previously directed Medicare’s Quality Improvement Organization and End Stage Renal Disease Network Programs. These national systems of contractors receive substantial federal funding to improve the quality and efficiency of care for all Medicare beneficiaries.
2003 Individual Award Winner
The winner of the 2003 Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award was Dr. Linda Aiken. Dr. Aiken was recognized for her emergence as the single most influential nurse leader and researcher in the field of nursing outcomes research. She has received every top research award in nursing and many awards in interdisciplinary fields, and won the 2003 Article of the Year Award from Academy Health for her Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) paper on hospital nurse staffing and health services research. Dr. Aiken has been at the forefront of the development and testing of hospital performance measures for more than two decades.
2002 Individual Award Winners
The winner of the 2002 Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award was the late John Eisenberg, MD. Dr. Eisenberg spearheaded the federal government’s response to the 1999 Institute of Medicine report on medical errors and patient safety, carrying the message of patient safety to policymakers, health care professionals, and patients. At the time of his death, Dr. Eisenberg was the administrator at the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) in the Department of Health and Human Services. While at AHRQ he helped shape federal initiatives on health care quality, including the recommendations of the President’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality and those of the Quality Interagency Coordination Task Force.
A special Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award was bestowed on John Noble, M.D., director of the Center for Primary Care at the Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Noble was recognized for his leadership role in creating and sustaining the Joint Commission's Ernest Amory Codman Awards. He worked tirelessly to champion the Awards, refine the Award criteria, expand the Award categories, and showcase the Award's winners. In addition, as chair of the Codman Award Evaluation Committee, he led the Committee in the selection of Codman winners each year. Dr. Noble is also the founder of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors and a frequent speaker both on the state and national level on patient safety issues. Like Dr. Codman, Dr. Noble believes strongly in recording observations and tracking patient outcomes.
2001 Individual Award Winner
The winner of the 2001 Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award was Dr. Norma Lang, Professor of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania and the Lillian S. Brunner Chair of Medical Surgical Nursing at the University. Dr. Lang was recognized for her pioneering work in identifying standards and measures to evaluate the quality of nursing care. The model for measuring and evaluating the quality of nursing care that bears her name has been adopted in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. For the past decade, Dr. Lang has been engaged in the scientific development of a system for classifying nursing practice. This has culminated in the development of the International Classification for Nursing Practice, the equivalent of the World Health Organization’s classification of common determinants of practice for the nursing profession.
2000 Individual Award Winner
The winner of the 2000 Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award was John W. Williamson, M.D., who was recognized as a pioneering leader in health care outcomes research and in the actual use of outcomes data to improve health care quality. During his 40-year career, he sought to integrate continuing education, health services research and medical informatics as the foundation for achieving outcomes improvement. His cutting-edge concepts have been applied throughout the world in more than 40 national quality improvement resource centers developed under the auspices of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Quality Assurance in Health Care.
1999 Individual Award Winner
The winner of the 1999 Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award was Donald M. Berwick, M.D., M.P.P., President and Chief Executive Officer of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Dr. Berwick was recognized for his leadership in introducing the concepts of quality improvement to health care. His dynamic influence among practicing clinicians, health care executives, and policy-makers has been a major stimulus for the adoption of new approaches to health care improvement in the United States and internationally.
1998 Individual Award Winners
The co-winners of the 1998 Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award were Paul B. Batalden, M.D., and Eugene C. Nelson, D.Sc., M.P.H., of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Dr. Batalden was recognized for his seminal work in introducing the evolving knowledge of quality improvement to health care, and for his innovative approaches to the education of health care professionals on quality improvement applications. Dr. Nelson was recognized for his contributions to the use of measurement to stimulate health care quality improvement, including his development of cutting-edge techniques for displaying and using data to facilitate clinical and organizational improvement.
1997 Individual Award Winner
The 1997 Ernest Amory Codman Individual Award winner was Avedis Donabedian, M.D., who was recognized for his prominent leadership role in drawing attention to the necessary role of measurement in improving health care quality and his structure-process-outcome formulation for quality assessment activities.