Quality As Strategy

Greetings from sunny San Francisco and the final day of the 2026 OPEN MINDS Service Excellence Institute. It has been a whirlwind three days of discussion around the themes of quality and value – and the role of those concepts in a changing health and human service field.

What struck me throughout the week was the significant gap between the discussion of ‘excellent’ quality and value within the field – and how consumers with a specific need identify an ‘excellent’ clinician or provider organization. The problem is due in part to the many disparate initiatives to identify ‘excellence.’ One example is the . . .