During the 2009 Health Forum / AHA Leadership Summit ARAMARK Healthcare convened eleven senior-level hospital and health care executives for a roundtable discussion entitled "Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence™: Driving Outcomes through Physician – Support Staff Collaboration".

The discussion echoed the theme of the 2009 Health Forum/American Hospital Association Leadership Summit—In Pursuit of Excellence: Improving Patient Care and Hospital Performance through Innovation—and leveraged key principles from the American Hospital Association's publication—Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence™: A Guide to Superior Performance Improvement.

Facilitated by Patrick Cawley, MD, MBA, FHM, Immediate Past President for the Society of Hospital Medicine, the dialogue was grounded in the Institute of Medicine's Six Aims of Improvement, as introduced in the Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century (2001). The aims have become the fundamental principles of performance excellence within the American Hospital Association's Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence™.

• TOPICS: Physicians, Quality & Patient Safety