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Ernest Amory Codman Award

The Ernest Amory Codman® Award recognizes Joint Commission-accredited or certified health care organizations who demonstrate excellence in the field of standards and practices.

Named for the physician regarded in health care as the “father of outcomes measurement,” the Ernest Amory Codman Award was created in 1996 to showcase the effective use of performance measures, thereby enhancing knowledge and encouraging the use of performance measurement to improve the quality and safety of health care.

The Ernest Amory Codman Award program additionally recognizes an individual who has played a significant leadership role in promoting the use of performance measures to improve health care services, or who has made major contributions to the development and testing of performance measures or the science and art of quality improvement. The Ernest Amory Codman Award Evaluation Committee oversees the review process for the individual award.

The program is currently on hiatus. The Joint Commission is reviewing the application, evaluation processes and program requirements to ensure the recognition remains relevant within the evolving healthcare landscape.

Ernest Amory Codman Award Categories include:

  • Ambulatory Care
  • Behavioral Health Care
  • Home Care (Includes Home Health, Personal Care and Support Services, Infusion Therapy, Home Medical Equipment, and Hospice Care)
  • Hospitals
  • Laboratories
  • Long Term Care
  • Multiple Organization Team (Composed of multiple Joint Commission accredited organizations that work collaboratively on a single performance improvement initiative).
  • Disease-Specific Care Certification

Previous organizational and individual awardees have included:


Codman Award

  • Carolinas Medical Center Charlotte, North Carolina
  • Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Cincinnati, Ohio
  • Mission Hospital Mission Viejo, California
  • Novant Health Winston-Salem, North Carolina
  • Najmedin (Najm) Meshkati, PhD
  • Shukri F. Khuri, M.D.

About Ernest Amory Codman, M.D.

A man of foresight and conviction, Ernest Amory Codman, M.D., was the acknowledged founder of what today is known as outcomes management. It was his lifelong pursuit to establish an “end results system” to track the outcomes of patient treatments as an opportunity to identify clinical misadventures that serve as the foundation for improving the care of future patients. He also believed that all this information should be made public so that patients could be guided in their choices of physicians and hospitals.

Once a prominent surgeon on the staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Codman eventually established his own hospital to pursue the performance measurement and improvement objectives he believed in so fervently. With an almost infinite interest in health care quality, Dr. Codman also helped lead the founding of the American College of Surgeons and its Hospital Standardization Program. That latter entity eventually became The Joint Commission.