Safety, quality and financial performance are inseparable for hospitals — and boards of directors and C-suites need to act on all three, according to Shawn Vincent, president and CEO of Maywood, Ill.-based Loyola Medicine and St. Joseph Health System.
During Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting, Mr. Vincent equated safety and quality outcomes to financial performance.
“Everything you’re doing from a safety and quality standpoint is just as important as my bottom-line numbers,” Mr. Vincent said. “We need to demand that from each one of our organizations.”
For example, Loyola Medicine’s MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn, Ill., has supported a temporary respite program for people without housing since 2019. The program is at Sojourner House in Oak Park, Ill., which offers discharged patients a safe place to recover before transitioning to long-term supportive housing.
“Certainly it’s much more cost effective to have them at a location like that, but it’s also morally the right thing to do. I know that’s hard to hear a CEO say that, but it’s true,” said Mr. Vincent, who also serves as president of Trinity Health’s Illinois and Indiana region. “It’s not always about money. But we also have to be realists.”
For the last eight years, he said his five-hospital system has cared for the highest acuity of patients in Illinois. With compounding stressors in the healthcare industry, from lacking behavioral health resources to ongoing supply chain disruptions, Mr. Vincent emphasized the importance of approaching safety and quality improvement like any major operational initiative — with clear goals, reliable data, strong champions and measurable outcomes.
He pointed to needlestick injuries as one example of data-driven problem-solving. After a deep dive into the system’s supply chain, his team discovered that 40% of needlesticks traced back to a single syringe product that had been inconsistently swapped between sites due to shortages.
Mr. Vincent also urged health system leaders to better communicate the financial value of safety improvements to their boards — an argument he said the industry has historically underdeveloped. Reductions in sepsis rates, shorter lengths of stay and fewer preventable complications all carry measurable financial impact while also freeing up capacity.
“I don’t think we’ve done a good job historically of packaging this and selling it as a whole,” he said. “That’s on all of us. We’ve got to figure out a better way to do that.”
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