While any culture change philosophy or model is a culture, and not a checklist, we now recognize the essential need to determine and define the standards for reaching, achieving, and sustaining patient-centered excellence. Planetree, a non-profit organization, has worked over 30 years with its affiliates to implement and support transformational change. What Planetree discovered is that there needs to be a level of consistency by which patient-centered excellence is evaluated and acknowledged. Therefore, they created a designation program that provides a practical, operational, framework for evaluating the organizational systems and processes necessary to sustain a patient-centered culture. 

The designation initiative has been led by the Planetree Advisory Council, a group of national leaders from government, academia, and along with a network of providers, advocacy, and industry trade organizations. In effort to break down the silos with providing patient-centered care across healthcare settings, the Advisory Council was tasked with integrating the designation criteria used in hospital environments, while tailoring it to meet the diverse needs of continuing care organizations. A result of this work is an integrated set of designation criteria that can be applied across the healthcare continuum. In conjunction with the integrated criteria is a formal set of resources and tools available to guide sites in training personnel, establishing organizational structures that serve as a foundation for implementation, and establishing processes to collect and evaluate qualitative and quantitative outcome measures.