Patty Atkins serves as the quality and patient safety executive at Adventist Health. Her responsibilities include overseeing quality in both acute care and ambulatory care, leading systemwide high reliability strategy, strengthening safety event management and learning systems, advancing just and accountable culture, and supporting innovation that improves reliability and performance. She also helps guide the use of AI to enhance safety event management and organizational learning across the enterprise. Under her leadership, the system has achieved meaningful gains in nationally recognized quality and safety performance, including gains in CMS hospital star ratings. In her current role, the system increased the number of hospitals earning Leapfrog “A” or “B” grades by 50%. Most recently, she has been leading the integration of AI into the high reliability platform, a reporting and learning system that helps make safety systems smarter, more efficient and more effective. During her time at San Diego-based Sharp HealthCare, she served as vice president of quality, patient safety and Lean Six Sigma, helping lead high reliability efforts that reduced preventable harm by 80% in three years.
