Healthcare is on the forefront of innovation, but often, it’s the large expensive programs that receive the most attention.
Amid financial difficulties, workforce strains and evolving technologies, system leaders are finding and developing more low-cost programs that have an outsized impact. These programs, much like smoke detectors or speed bumps, become an ingrained part of hospital operations that affects safety, quality of care and workforce satisfaction.
Here are seven examples of “smoke detector-like” programs that are garnering such results across the country.
Ballad Health’s Appalachian Highlands Care Network
In 2020, the Johnson City, Tenn.-based system launched its Appalachian Highlands Care Network with two goals in mind: increase access for low-income, uninsured patients across 21 counties, and proactively manage patients’ health and social needs before conditions worsen.
“We saw too many patients arriving in our emergency departments after their conditions had severely worsened, which led to more inpatient care and worse health outcomes,” Todd Norris, senior vice president of community health and system advancement at Ballad Health, told Becker’s. “We began treating this group as a value-based population — reaching them earlier, connecting them with high-value care and helping prevent avoidable hospital use.”
The network collaborated with community partners to coordinate specialty care for uninsured patients and embedded community health workers, community health navigators, health coaches and care managers in free clinics. It also placed navigators in the ED and inpatient settings across Ballad.
The results: more than 11,000 individuals consistently enrolled, a 31% reduction in preventable healthcare costs, a 28% reduction in inpatient utilization, and a 200% return on investment.
“The program more than pays for itself while improving health outcomes, access to primary and specialty care and quality of life,” Mr. Norris said. “We’ve also seen participants gain employment and insurance coverage.”
Children’s Nebraska’s AI to analyze operational safety briefings
The Omaha, Neb.-based hospital has implemented a video sentiment analysis AI software to improve the efficiency of operational safety briefing meetings, and pull out actionable insights that may have been missed in traditional reporting.
Over the last 18 months, the AI tool has scanned hundreds of meeting recordings across all hospital departments. The program then creates a report that goes to administrators on call, who use the information to identify key areas for improvement, better ways to facilitate meetings and track trends.
One surprising trend the tool identified was centered around doors and elevators. The AI found a number of occasions where broken doors led to delays and patient safety issues. This led leaders to create a system that ensured every door was in working order and service contracts were in place for quick maintenance fixes.
“The compounding effect of basic access — getting into and around the building — was stunning,” Ryan Cameron, vice president of technology and innovation at Children’s Nebraska, told Becker’s. “It affected patient experience, interdepartmental coordination and staff stress. Like every OSB, we knew there was a problem, the team worked it and we followed up the next day. But we challenged ourselves: Can we shrink 24 hours to an hour? To 30 minutes? To 15? That efficiency push was our unexpected ‘smoke signal.'”
Hartford HealthCare’s Clinical Care Redesign program
Several years ago, the Hartford, Conn.-based system launched a clinical care redesign program that tracks clinical supplies and variations in how physicians use them. The dashboard allows every physician to see how much they spend on care delivery, down to the commodities used in surgery, and compare their costs with their peers. The dashboard spans all institutes and regions, and is only used to help physicians understand the cost of care they provide, compare the outcomes and identify areas for improvement.
This year alone, the program has saved $38 million by reducing variation and waste. It has also changed the culture.
“Our clinicians are now more engaged with supply chain decisions and bring a value-driven mindset to vendor negotiations,” Ajay Kumar, MD, chief clinical officer at the system, told Becker’s. “Importantly, this program isn’t about cutting costs at all costs. In some cases, we’ve increased spending when higher-quality care required it. Our goal is value, not austerity.”
HCA Healthcare’s Los Robles Health System’s “smoke detector for sepsis”
The Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based system created a tool that acts as a “smoke detector for sepsis.” The algorithmic tool, Sepsis Prediction and Optimization of Therapy, is designed to detect early warning signs of sepsis and enable care teams to respond faster. SPOT continuously monitors clinical data to detect suspicious patterns. If a dangerous pattern consistent with sepsis is detected, an alert is sent directly to the clinical teams’ mobile devices, prompting them to assess the patient and begin treatment if sepsis is confirmed.
The tool rolled out in 2018 and is used by HCA Healthcare hospitals nationwide. In HCA hospitals in California and Nevada alone, more than 3,000 patients with septic shock or severe sepsis have been treated in 2025, with a nearly 90% survival rate. On average, patients were screened within 12 minutes of the SPOT alert.
Kaiser Permanente’s colorectal screening program
The Oakland, Calif.-based system launched an outreach program to increase routine colorectal screening by using fecal immunochemical tests. These tests detect blood in the stool, which is a possible early sign of cancer and can indicate a patient should follow up with a colonoscopy.
Using the electronic medical record, clinicians sent reminders to patients who were overdue for screening and mailed a test to complete at home. The intervention increased screen rates among patients 50 to 75 from 37% in 2000 to 80% in 2019.
“This also reduces the burden on frontline teams to remind members to schedule their screening and prioritizes colonoscopies — a more invasive and costly procedure
— for those who truly need them,” Tatjana Kolevska, MD, medical director of the Kaiser Permanente National Excellence in Cancer Care Program, told Becker’s.
Memorial Hermann Health System’s Multi-visit Patient Program
The Houston-based system launched its multi-visit patient program in 2021 as part of the system’s emergency department navigation strategy. The program is designed to serve patients with 10 or more ED visits annually. These “frequent flyers” contribute disproportionately to ED overcrowding, uncompensated care and poor health outcomes, and visits are often driven by social barriers that make it a difficult cycle to break. The program was developed to coordinate system-level care plans to address clinical and non-medical drivers.
Patients in the program are identified through Epic reporting and are given holistic assessments by the clinical team and community health workers. A care plan is created that integrates medical, behavioral and social support, including vouchers to encourage follow-up appointments, transportation and ongoing follow-up calls with community health workers, Teal Holden, senior vice president of ambulatory services, post-acute care and community health at Memorial Hermann, told Becker’s.
From July 2024 to June 2025, 758 multi-visit unique patients had a navigation encounter. Among the 38,959 total navigated patients to date, the majority are self-pay, Medicaid or uninsured, and many live in one of 58 high-need ZIP codes. These patients were predominantly Hispanic and Black, adults 18 to 49 years old and nearly all faced high-risk social needs such as food insecurity, housing instability and transportation barriers.
Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare’s organizational performance tracker
The Memphis, Tenn.-based system created its organizational performance tracker, or OPT, to improve accountability at every level of care across its five adult hospitals, a children’s hospital, and more than 60 physician practices and ancillary service centers, Wayne Lipson, MD, chief medical officer and senior vice president at Methodist Le Bonheur, told Becker’s.
Before OPT, the system used a scorecard with three to four annual goals for patient outcomes and safety, but these were difficult to assess, Dr. Lipson said. Since implementing Opt, the system’s quality metrics have expanded to more than 70 weighted metrics that roll into the overall clinical excellence score, all under one set goal.
“The OPT became our single source of truth relative to performance,” Dr. Lipson said.
The tool was created and implemented internally by the system’s clinical decision support team, and only had costs related to Tableau licenses and monitors in administrative suites.
Thanks to the tool, which has been implemented across the system, the patient safety indicator-90 composite score has received is 0.70 year-to-date — 30% lower than the national average.
