The Cystic Fibrosis Center at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC Receives Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Quality Care Award

December 6, 2011

The Antonio J. and Janet Palumbo Cystic Fibrosis Center (CF Center) at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC was recently selected as a 2011 recipient of the annual Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Quality Care Award: Recognizing Outstanding QI Processes and Accomplishments. Children’s was one of 11 cystic fibrosis care centers to be honored.

“We are honored that the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation selected Children’s Hospital as a recipient of its Quality Care Award for 2011,” said David Orenstein, M.D., co-director, Children’s Hospital’s CF Center. “We have always had a focus on improving the care we provide to patients with CF and we see this award as a validation of that focus. With the participation not only of fellows, but also family members, our efforts have resulted in enhanced care and outcomes for our patients and families affected by this chronic disease.”

The CF Foundation instituted the Quality Care Award in 2008. The awards were presented this year at the CF Foundation’s North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference on Nov. 5 in Anaheim, Calif. Award recipients demonstrated sustained quality improvements that improved outcomes. Centers receiving the honor excelled at meeting the following quality improvement performance standards: actively uses clinical outcomes data to identify opportunities for improvement and documents results of improvement efforts; aligns improvement efforts to result in measurable improvement in important clinical outcomes; consistently and actively involves patients and families in identifying, designing and/or implementing improvement efforts; employs innovative strategies to improve care processes and outcomes; and implements system changes that result in high reliability of care processes.

The Antonio J. and Janet Palumbo Cystic Fibrosis Center at Children's Hospital is dedicated to providing state-of-the-art care to patients and families with cystic fibrosis, education for health care professionals, and conducting clinical and basic research. Led by co-directors, Dr. Orenstein and Daniel J. Weiner, M.D., the program is accredited by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for clinical care and research. Based on consistently good patient outcomes, the CF Center recently was selected as a benchmarking site, from which other programs could learn from their practices.

The CF Foundation accredits and supports a national CF care center network that has been recognized by the National Institutes of Health as a model of care for a chronic disease. Based in Bethesda, Md., the Foundation is a donor-supported nonprofit organization that funds more CF research than any other organization, and nearly every CF drug available today was made possible because of Foundation support. For more information, go to www.cff.org.

For more information about the CF Center at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, visit http://www.chp.edu/CHP/cf.

Andrea Kunicky, 412-692-6254, andrea.kunicky@chp.edu
Marc Lukasiak, 412-692-7919, marc.lukasiak@chp.edu