As the second half of 2025 approaches, hospitals and health systems are taking stock of their annual quality improvement initiatives and pushing forward.
Three healthcare leaders shared with Becker’s the quality metrics they are tracking most closely, including efficient discharges and fall prevention.
Question: Looking ahead to the second half of the year, what is one specific quality measure your organization is aiming to improve by December, and what are the key steps or strategies you are taking to get there?
Catherine Chang, MD. Chief Quality Officer at Prisma Health (Greenville, S.C.): At Prisma Health, our commitment to building and maintaining trust with patients and communities is at the heart of everything we do. We have prioritized accessible, safe care. Our “we will see you now” approach is embedded across all care settings, ensuring timely and compassionate service.
To support this commitment, we actively listen to our patients and use data from EHRs to provide our teams with actionable insights regarding wait times for appointments and procedural scheduling. These insights help us evaluate performance and drive improvements at both the unit and practice levels. We’ve also expanded access points — including urgent care and imaging services — to better meet the evolving needs of our growing community.
As healthcare leaders, we recognize our responsibility to provide safe care and minimize risk for patients, families, and team members. We’ve made an enterprise-wide commitment to fostering a just culture and advancing process-focused improvements. This includes creating multiple channels for team members to share ideas and concerns about safety and care delivery. To support this, we’ve implemented a safety management tool that enables all team members to report issues, suggest improvements and track the effectiveness of corrective actions.
We apply a similar approach to patient survey data, using it to enhance communication and improve daily care experiences. We are also continuously exploring innovative technologies to protect and empower our teams — whether they’re working in acute care facilities, ambulatory settings or directly in patients’ homes. Our goal is to create safer, more responsive care environments that reflect the voices of those we serve and those who serve alongside us.
Barb Ditzler, MSN, RN. Manager/Director Quality and Operational Improvement at University of Iowa Health Care (Iowa City): At the University of Iowa Health Care Medical Center Downtown, we are focusing on fall prevention and interventions. We started our year with a number of falls resulting in injury. Our teams took this seriously and worked hard to review fall risk assessment and interventions from our University of Iowa Health Care system on what had worked. We implemented education on falls risk factors. Auditing was a key action we needed to perform, but we knew that having just unit leaders performing this was not going to be sustainable for improvement. We had already initiated bedside handoff. We empowered our nurses to use an audit tool during bedside handoff to hold each other accountable on fall risk identification and appropriate interventions in place. We made significant improvement with our falls. We will continue to work on this sustained improvement for the remainder of the year. It is important for quality patient care to reward our successes but stay vigilant on maintaining that improvement.
We are also beginning a new journey with a quality data third-party vendor that allows for a unified quality dashboard with our system and the ability to benchmark our data with other customers. Educating front-line providers and caregivers on this data will be important to provide transparency and understanding on areas we need to focus on improvement activities.
Shannon Odell, MSN, RN. Chief Nursing Officer at Nicklaus Children’s (Miami): We’ve done a ton of work on throughput over the last few years. One initiative we’re working on right now measures the time from when a patient’s discharge order is placed to when they actually leave the hospital. A lot of that process is nurse driven. Once the discharge order is in, it’s about what we’re doing as a nursing team to be prepared so that when the order is entered, we’re ready to safely discharge the patient from the organization. That’s important because if we don’t keep discharges moving when patients are ready, it causes downstream issues. We end up with backups in other areas of the hospital.
Our goal is to discharge patients within 45 minutes of the order being written. We’re slightly above that right now, but I’m confident the team can bring that time down. It’s really about engaging our nurses in the work — not just telling them what to do, but involving them in the process and showing them the impact. We also make it a point to share data regularly with the team. We give updates on how we’re doing, and we take the time to celebrate and recognize teams when they hit that goal or target.
