Health care organizations have access to more quality data than ever, but turning that information into meaningful action can be challenging. Patients and families face a similar challenge when trying to understand publicly available information about hospital performance.

In this episode of Key in to Quality, Mayo Clinic experts discuss HealthLocator, a free public resource designed to make hospital-quality information easier to find, understand and compare. HealthLocator brings together publicly available data on quality, patient experience and patient safety, helping users explore hospital performance and make more informed decisions about care.

The conversation also explores the What If Calculator, an interactive tool that allows health care organizations to model how changes in individual measures could affect domain scores and overall HealthLocator performance. By testing different scenarios, quality teams can better understand which measures are influencing results and where deeper investigation may be useful.

The episode emphasizes that data and analytics are starting points, not substitutes for clinical expertise and professional judgment. Effective improvement requires collaboration across quality, clinical, analytics and operational teams to understand what is happening behind the data, identify meaningful opportunities and ask better questions about how care can improve.

HealthLocator: Unbiased U.S. hospital rankings from real data

Host: Timothy Morgenthaler, M.D. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/timorgenthaler/

Host: Sheri Nemec| https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheryl-sheri-nemec-a627982a/

#mayokeyintoquality

Medication preparation and delivery involve numerous people, systems and handoffs — many of which are difficult to see. When a medication cannot be located at its scheduled administration time, nurses and pharmacy teams may spend valuable time searching, interrupting workflows and potentially delaying patient care.

In this episode of Key in to Quality, pharmacy and nursing colleagues share how they identified this visibility gap and adapted existing real-time location system (RTLS) infrastructure to help track selected medications between pharmacy preparation and administration. By integrating location information into familiar electronic health record workflows, teams can more quickly determine the last known location of a medication, reducing unnecessary searching and remakes.

The conversation explores how multidisciplinary collaboration, limited initial testing and an iterative approach helped move the work from an idea to a sustainable workflow. The guests also share lessons for other healthcare organizations, including starting with existing infrastructure, focusing on high-value use cases and involving the people who perform and support the work.

Ultimately, the project demonstrates a fundamental principle of quality improvement: Before teams can improve a complex process, they first need to make the invisible visible.

Host: Timothy Morgenthaler, M.D. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/timorgenthaler/

Host: Sheri Nemec| https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheryl-sheri-nemec-a627982a/

#mayokeyintoquality

Twenty-five years after the landmark To Err Is Human report launched the modern patient safety movement, healthcare organizations face a new challenge: learning effectively from the growing volume of safety information they collect.

In this episode of Key in to Quality, a multidisciplinary Mayo Clinic team discusses a new AI-enabled safety platform designed to address what Mayo Clinic calls the “safety reporting paradox.” Using multiple AI agents, the platform reviews safety reports, identifies reportable events, detects serious harm and sentinel events and validates results while keeping safety professionals integral to the process.

The conversation also explores a pattern discovery agent that analyzes thousands of low-harm and no-harm events to identify emerging risks before serious harm occurs, helping shift safety efforts from reactive response to proactive learning.

Another development is the “patient safety vital sign,” an AI-enabled tool designed to provide real-time, individualized assessments of patient safety risk at the bedside.

The episode concludes by examining how AI can augment human expertise, reduce administrative burden and expand safety teams’ capacity to focus on investigation, improvement and prevention.

Host: Timothy Morgenthaler, M.D. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/timorgenthaler/

Host: Sheri Nemec| https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheryl-sheri-nemec-a627982a/

#mayokeyintoquality