Gage Awards

Gage Awards for operational excellence recognize health care organizations implementing transformative initiatives, driving a direct measurable connection between organizational transformation and enhanced operational outcomes. These programs exemplify how strategic and operational changes can strengthen processes, improve organizational capacity, and elevate patient care and health equity.

This award honors initiatives that have successfully refined workflows, optimized resource management, and integrated best practices across the organization, resulting in tangible improvements in service delivery, financial stability, and administrative efficiency. The initiative enhances patient experience and demonstrates a commitment to fostering a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and workforce engagement. These practices equip health care systems to efficiently operate hospitals to address their patients’ health inequities better and serve their communities.

This award category will recognize essential hospitals at the forefront of responding to emerging operational challenges with timely and impactful solutions. Programs should emphasize the critical role of leadership and strategic foresight. The initiative is deeply committed to improving workforce well-being, patient outcomes, and community health while driving sustainable operational performance.

Gage Awards for population health recognize successful programs aimed at improving health outcomes for a defined population or community by addressing the social and economic factors that influence health.

These social determinants of health can include housing instability, food insecurity, climate vulnerability, transportation needs, utility needs, education, family and social supports, employment and income, interpersonal violence, health behaviors, health literacy, community infrastructure, legal needs, structural racism, and social needs screening.

Key population health program features may include:

• Working outside hospital walls to care for and/or improve the health of individuals living in a specified geographic area (e.g., county, city, etc.)
• A focus on promoting equitable health outcomes for under-resourced populations
• Using community-based resources to support population health
• Addressing social and economic factors
• Forming community partnerships to combat structural racism
• Creating a learning organization able to rapidly deploy best practices
• Forming community partnerships to address population health

Highly competitive programs will be innovative; engage the community and involve patients throughout the process, from design and implementation to completion; and partner with community-based organizations to reduce health disparities, improve health equity, and/or combat structural racism in vulnerable populations.

Gage Awards for quality improvement recognize data-driven programs that improve care delivery and patient experience, engage patients and their families, reduce staff burnout, and/or reduce or eliminate harmful events affecting individual patients, groups of patients, or the community.

Improvement programs may include evidence-based interventions, standardized practices, bundles of care, and checklists. Highly competitive programs will be innovative; show leadership commitment; and engage the community and patients from design to completion to reduce health disparities, improve health equity, and/or combat structural racism in vulnerable populations.