In 2011, John Calderone, CEO at Olympia Medical Center in Los Angeles, was hit with a one-two punch: he discovered the hospital was struggling with a staggering rate of healthcare-associated infections, and later, was put on the spot when the media shared news that the facility possessed one of the highest rates of central-line associated blood stream infections in the nation.

Below, Calderone shares how he turned the hospital's reputation around:

To enact meaningful change, I needed to understand what was being done, and what was not, to prevent and control the spread of infection in my hospital. I asked the directors of infectious disease, quality and nursing to develop both an assessment to measure infection and a plan to combat our unacceptable rate of CLABSI and other infections.

Over the course of a near-sleepless month, I worked very closely with the medical executive committee and the infection preventionists to come up with a path forward that would reverse this problem.

To start with, the heads of quality, nursing and infection control visited every patient twice daily, giving me daily reports on their current condition, with a focus on any possible or confirmed infections. To this day, I get a report every Friday with this summary. If we see that a unit is slipping or a certain cohort of patients is regressing, we hold court and identify a solution to the problem.

On top of this comprehensive patient monitoring program, we launched a robust hand hygiene campaign to identify those who were not complying. Everyone was held accountable.

Campaign tactics included buttons and posters that encouraged patients to "Ask If I've Washed My Hands." We had "secret shoppers" deployed throughout the hospital to report on doctors and others who were reluctant hand washers.

Initially, I heard a lot of excuses. But, there was no compromise, no matter how busy they were, or what station in life they had attained. Infection control was and is an organizational priority, and I was willing to do whatever was necessary to improve the quality of healthcare we were providing. My job was to convince hospital staff that preventing potentially deadly infections was the right thing to do.

We hit our goal of zero HAIs in six months. Today we are nearly running at zero for all targeted infections, including CLABSI and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. That means we've had no CLABSIs in the past four months and no cases of MRSA since January 2013. With my team's help, we were able to make infection prevention a part of the DNA of Olympia Medical Center.

To read Calderon's account in it's entirety, including his list of "Lessons Learned," click here.