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/

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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/

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This episode of Key in to Quality explores how patient and family stories can add meaning and context to healthcare quality, safety and performance data. Erin Fairchild, Kelly Vorseth and Madeline Rauma share how Mayo Clinic captures patient feedback, organizes meaningful comments and turns them into Mission Moments that help connect teams to purpose and organizational values.

The discussion highlights how simple survey questions such as “What impressed you?” and “What disappointed you?” can generate richer, more actionable feedback. As the volume of responses has grown, natural language processing and AI tools have helped categorize comments and identify themes that support improvement, recognition and leadership decision-making.

The episode also examines how Mission Moments and other storytelling approaches bring patient experiences to life across meetings, huddles and communications. Through examples from nursing and other areas, the guests show how stories can recognize staff contributions, reinforce culture and highlight the impact of compassion, teamwork and communication.

Listeners also learn practical ways organizations can start small by creating simple, accessible systems for collecting and sharing patient stories.

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

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

#mayokeyintoquality

In this episode of Key In to Quality, a multidisciplinary Mayo Clinic team discusses how improving the patient experience can strengthen the quality of surgical care. The conversation explores how viewing the surgical journey through the eyes of patients and families is helping identify opportunities to improve communication, preparation, predictability and support before, during and after surgery.

Drawing on patient interviews, observations, survey data and staff insights, the team identified consistent themes that led to practical improvements across the surgical experience. These include personalized pre-surgery videos, streamlined pre-registration, enhanced waiting room support and new approaches to keeping patients and families informed throughout their care.

The episode also highlights the importance of collaboration among physicians, nurses and operational teams to improve every touchpoint of the patient journey. Timely, transparent communication helps reduce uncertainty, build trust and improve the overall patient experience.

Listeners will learn how Mayo Clinic is using patient feedback, operational data and continuous quality improvement principles to enhance surgical care and ensure improvements remain effective as patient needs and services continue to evolve.

Guests:

Dr. Sarah Dodd | LinkedIn

Andrea Nelson | LinkedIn

Kayla Simiele | LinkedIn

#PatientExperience #HealthcareQuality #MayoClinic #QualityImprovement #PatientCenteredCare

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

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

#mayokeyintoquality

This episode of Key in to Quality communication as an important driver of healthcare quality and examines whether communication skills can be strengthened through coaching and training. A Mayo Clinic pilot study compared individualized communication coaching, a communication skills class and usual practice to understand the potential impact on patient experience.

The study found encouraging trends. Clinicians who received individualized coaching achieved higher overall patient experience scores, while both the coaching and communication-class groups improved on nine of 10 patient experience measures. Although the small sample size limited statistical significance, the findings point to opportunities for further study and suggest that intentional communication development may benefit both patients and clinicians.

The discussion also highlights practical considerations for healthcare organizations, including partnering with communication experts, securing leadership support, designing interventions that fit clinician workflows and starting with small pilot programs. The episode reinforces that communication is a learnable skill and a core component of quality care, with the potential to strengthen trust, connection and the overall patient experience.

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

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

#mayokeyintoquality

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) can occur even when medications are prescribed and administered correctly, yet reporting has historically varied across Mayo Clinic campuses, limiting opportunities to identify enterprise-wide trends and improve patient safety. In this episode of Key in to Quality, a multidisciplinary team representing pharmacy, nursing, patient safety, quality, analytics and regional stakeholders shares how they developed a standardized, enterprise-wide approach to ADR reporting and evaluation.

After reviewing existing safety processes, FDA MedWatch standards and frontline feedback, the team created a five-level ADR severity scale focused on patient outcomes rather than medication errors. The scale was integrated into Mayo Clinic's electronic patient safety reporting system and paired with enterprise dashboards that enable standardized reporting, trend analysis and organizational learning.

Since implementation, the framework has improved reporting consistency, strengthened FDA reporting and enhanced the ability to identify system-level safety opportunities. Validation showed users applied the scale with more than 85% agreement compared with expert review, demonstrating how standardized reporting, multidisciplinary collaboration and enterprise data can transform individual adverse drug reactions into actionable insights that improve medication safety across the organization.

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

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

#mayokeyintoquality

This episode of Key in to Quality explores how a multidisciplinary team at Mayo Clinic Arizona reduced catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) by approximately 50% during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite increased patient acuity, greater catheter use, and the operational challenges of the pandemic, the team achieved lasting improvements through collaboration, frontline engagement, and continuous learning.

Rather than relying on a single intervention, the team brought together infection prevention, nursing, quality, leadership, and performance improvement experts to identify contributing factors, test solutions, and use data to guide decisions. A culture of psychological safety and a no-blame approach encouraged open communication and problem-solving, while unit-based CAUTI champions helped drive local improvements and share successful practices.

The effort not only reduced infection rates beyond external benchmarks but also strengthened teamwork, increased frontline engagement, and created sustainable infrastructure for ongoing improvement. The team's experience reinforces that successful quality improvement depends on both technical methods and human factors, with trust, adaptability, and collaboration serving as the foundation for lasting change.

Gina Hull, M.S.N., R.N., CIC, LinkedIn

Eric Siebeneck, M.S., LinkedIn

Christine “Chris” Aliory

Brigid Kiley, M.S., R.N., C.C.R.N., S.P.E.C.

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

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

#mayokeyintoquality