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 national rankings put out by U.S. News & World Report. The just-released listing – …