About CWISH...

The Council Of Women's and Infants' Specialty Hospitals (CWISH) is a membership organization of non-profit hospitals that are leaders in providing services to women and infants. 

CWISH began in 1991 as a group of non-competing hospitals interested in sharing greater financial and operational data.  The goal of this information sharing was to assist each organization in better servicing its patients and to benefit from the collective strengths of the entire group. The National Perinatal Information Center (NPIC) provides coordinating and data gathering function for the CWISH hospitals. 

Organization...

CWISH currently has twelve hospital members representing over 110,000 deliveries annually. There are nine active committees: executive/legislative, financial/operational, quality/labor and delivery/mother baby, marketing, gynecology, NICU, recruitment, retention, education, magnet status and location.  The Executive Committee serves as the planning and decision making committee.  The members are senior administrators representing each member hospital and the presidency rotates among the members.  The committee conducts monthly conference calls and plans an annual fall membership meeting.

The Financial/operational committee is made up of financial and clinical representatives from each hospital and is charged with designing, submitting and reviewing comparative benchmarking statistics from each member hospital.  The committee usually focuses on one clinical area of interest and will pull in ad hoc members of the committee as needed. Analyses have been completed on OR turnaround times, and the labor and delivery and NICU areas. Comparative data includes volume, staffing, productivity and operational information across the member hospitals. The committee conducts its business by regular conference calls and has one meeting a year focusing on the area currently being studied.

The current president of CWISH is Dot Fowler, Director of Patient Care Services for Women, Children & Oncology, Christiana Care Health Services, Newark, DE.