The Joint Commission and National Quality Forum announce recipients of 2024 Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Awards
The Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum (NQF) announced the recipients of the 2024 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Awards. Awards are presented in three categories, and winners are selected by a diverse panel of national patient safety and quality experts.
The Eisenberg Awards, named in honor of the late John M. Eisenberg, MD, MBA, a leading advocate for healthcare quality improvement, recognize major achievements by individuals and organizations that are improving patient safety and healthcare quality in innovative and measurable ways.
The 2024 honorees are:
- National Level Innovation in Patient Safety and Quality
CommonSpirit Health, Chicago
Innovative Approach to Achieving and Sustaining Clinical Excellence - Local Level Innovation in Patient Safety and Quality
Parkland Health, Dallas
Identifying and Preventing Missed Opportunities for Diagnosis - Individual Achievement
Elliott K. Main, MD
Clinical Professor, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California
CommonSpirit Health implemented an innovative approach to achieving and sustaining clinical excellence. By utilizing quality and patient safety measures to identify improvement opportunities, CommonSpirit prioritized three key areas: heart failure, maternal hypertension, and catheter-associated urinary tract infections. After implementing an eight-step quality improvement model and an advanced technology suite, CommonSpirit achieved significant improvements in hospital mortality rates, heart failure mortality, and disparities in care. Its virtually integrated care model embeds virtual nurses into hospital care teams at many of its locations to mentor new staff, reduce workload, manage care transitions, and cultivate collaborative patient care. Their efforts have led to improved care for more than 409,130 patients over three years and prevented more than 2,700 harm events across 99 acute care hospitals.
Parkland Health developed a comprehensive surveillance program to address missed opportunities for diagnosis. Initially focused on tracking delayed imaging findings, the program evolved to manage six high-risk diagnostic scenarios through a centralized digital health center. Key innovations include an AI language model that achieved 97.2% accuracy in identifying delayed imaging findings, a population health management tool, bilingual staff trained in motivational interviewing, and the integration of social workers. Parkland’s efforts delivered significant improvements for its patients:
- Achieved completed recommended follow-up studies in 91% of patients with abnormal imaging studies, with 4.3% of completed cases being found to have cancer and 3% to have a medical issue requiring surgical intervention.
- Delays in overdue imaging surveillance findings decreased from 17% to 9%.
- Follow-up rates for abnormal mammograms improved from 83% to 87%.
- Abnormal tumor marker follow-up gaps decreased by 27%.
Elliott K. Main, MD, clinical professor, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Stanford University School of Medicine, is a national leader in maternal quality and safety, directing programs at the hospital, health system, state, and national levels. Among his accomplishments, he co-founded state and national-level quality improvement collaboratives for maternal health, including the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, which became the model for large-scale maternal quality improvement learning collaboratives. Nationally, he led the formation of the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health and has aided the development of state perinatal quality collaboratives across 49 states. Dr. Main led research to establish four national perinatal care metrics used in both Joint Commission and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services programs. He also led the development of widely adopted obstetric quality improvement toolkits and national safety bundles. At the state level, he led the creation of the Maternal Data Center, which provides timely and low-burden outcome data and analysis to hospitals across California, Oregon, and Washington.
