The last two years have been huge for Wentworth-Douglass Hospital, part of Mass General Brigham.
In 2023, leaders at the Dover, N.H.-based hospital used national benchmarks to identify areas for improvement and underwent an 18-month effort to strengthen patient safety and improve outcomes. They restructured quality oversight and narrowed focus on core performance measures. Hospital leaders partnered with health system executives to reduce length of stay by more than 10% in 2025.
Darin Roark, BSN, RN, president and COO of Wentworth-Douglass Hospital, attributed the gains to disciplined daily management and consistent communication across clinical teams.
“It took a lot of change,” he said during an interview with the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.” “You know, we have a 9:30 morning huddle every day where all of the leaders across our organization gather, and we go through the opportunities and the challenges that we know exist for that day and try to support each other.”
Clinicians review and share quality and safety metrics during the huddles so everyone knows the daily statistics. The team gets into every detail so all clinicians know, for example, exactly how many Foley catheters are in place, where the Foley catheters are, where the central lines are and when they are coming out. That focus continues at the unit level through daily multidisciplinary rounds.
“In every single nursing unit, we do a quality round,” he said. “That quality round is attended by our hospitalists who now are assigned geographically, and they report on every patient. Physical therapy is there. Pharmacy is there. Rehab is there. Case management is there. The nursing staff is there.”
The goal is full alignment around care plans and discharge readiness. Implementing those changes required patience and sustained leadership engagement.
“This was tough because we had to do a lot of changes to get there,” he said. “We had to move our hospitalist to geographic rounding, which was something that they didn’t do before.”
He added that listening to clinicians was essential.
“You have to really sit next to folks, sometimes hold their hand, guide them gently, and then listen intently as a leader to what the barriers are to being able to achieve this process,” Mr. Roark said.
Quality also improved through these efforts, going nearly 500 days without a CLABSI or CAUTI in the ICU and reducing the observed versus expected mortality.
“By doubling down on that patient experience, doubling down on the quality of care that we provide our patients, reducing our length of stay, we’re able to get patients back to their families quicker and avoid complications that patients could experience from just being in the hospital too long,” he said. “The beauty of all that is when you take great care of your patients, when you deliver great service, when you deliver great outcomes, it also supports your financial metrics and we’ve been the beneficiaries of that as well.”
Looking ahead, Mr. Roark said sustaining momentum will be one of the organization’s biggest challenges.
“The hardest thing we’re gonna have to do in 2026 really is maintaining the great momentum that we had in ’25,” he said. “When you go through a lot of change, there’s a lot of excitement, there’s a lot of angst, and then you come out on the other side of that and you continue to see the fruits of your labor.”
Quality improvement will remain a central to the hospital maintaining its clinical outcomes performance edge next year.
“One of the things we’re going to be focused on in 2026 is our sepsis patients,” Mr. Roark said. “We still have opportunities there. We really want to dive deep into making sure that we have the right drug for the right bug and doing that as quickly as possible because we know early identification of the appropriate bug in those sepsis patients with the right antibiotic will really, really enhance outcomes.”
The hospital is also planning service line growth and geographic expansion, including a freestanding emergency department in its northern service area.
“We’ll be looking to start construction and hopefully finish a freestanding emergency room department in the Rochester community, which is in our Northern service area,” he said. “Because we already have roughly 30% of our daily ED volume at our central campus comes from folks to the North.”
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