The healthcare organization earned the honor for improving safety culture through leadership engagement, open communication, and data-driven risk reduction.
ECRI named Northern Arizona Healthcare the winner of the 2025 Safety Excellence Award, recognizing the organization’s systemwide approach to advancing a culture of safety, accountability, and transparency.
Northern Arizona Healthcare implemented a wide range of initiatives to strengthen its safety culture, uniting leadership and frontline staff through shared learning, open communication, and consistently reinforcing safety priorities, according to a release from ECRI.
The annual Safety Excellence Award from ECRI and the ISMP Patient Safety Organization (PSO) honors outstanding patient safety initiatives and evidence-based strategies that improve safety-related outcomes.
“We are pleased to receive this recognition of the work each of our colleagues puts in daily to ensure patient safety and quality of care is always our top priority,” says Northern Arizona Healthcare CEO Dave Cheney in a release. “We know we only receive this kind of recognition when our teams are working well together and prioritizing the patient at every step, which means we do our best when that’s our culture. It’s rewarding to see validation of our hard work.”
Soliciting Input Then Taking Action
Northern Arizona Healthcare’s journey to safety excellence is anchored in leadership visibility and staff empowerment, according to a release from ECRI. The organization introduced monthly open forums that invite any team member to speak directly with the CEO and patient safety leaders about challenges, risks, and improvement ideas. Action plans developed from those discussions are posted on the employee portal for all staff to access, creating a feedback loop that drives continuous improvement.
Daily safety briefings were redesigned to identify barriers in real time and encourage proactive problem-solving across staff units. Leadership, quality, and safety teams now convene at the bedside, gathering feedback from patients and their families and sharing insights with the rest of the care team immediately.
To reinforce accountability and promote shared learning, Northern Arizona Healthcare revamped its “just culture” training and incorporated concepts from Extreme Ownership, a leadership framework developed by Navy SEALs that emphasizes personal responsibility and team cohesion, according to a release from ECRI.
Embracing System-Level Improvements
Northern Arizona Healthcare also employed Root Cause Analysis and Failure Mode and Effects Analysis to uncover system-level opportunities for improvement. From there, they implemented numerous strategies, including adopting a mobile app to facilitate accurate pediatric weight-based medication dosing in emergency settings, investing in emergency department stretchers with bed alarms, scales, and call-light capabilities, and implementing a standardized process for handling and transporting nuclear medicine materials.
Advancing Safe Medication Practices
Northern Arizona Healthcare committed to continually improve safe medication use through the rigorous analysis of error reports and near-miss incidents, according to a release from ECRI. They implemented several best practices from ISMP, including adopting IV fluid shortage management strategies in the wake of Hurricane Helene, standardizing vaccine storage to reduce the risk of administration errors, and deploying new IV pump technology to ensure interoperability.
“ECRI is proud to celebrate [Northern Arizona Healthcare’s] achievements,” says ECRI president and CEO Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD, in a release. “They embraced system design, standardization, and a proactive approach to preventing harm. By engaging every colleague, from executives to bedside caregivers, they’re fostering a culture rooted in trust and accountability and driving meaningful cultural transformation.
“A strong safety culture alone isn’t enough to improve safety long-term. But culture combined with system improvements, like those [Northern Arizona Healthcare] implemented, creates sustainable change. That approach can position healthcare facilities to break the cycle of adverse events, burnt out staff, and siloed troubleshooting.”
Award Honorable Mentions
Two additional ECRI partners received an Honorable Mention for the Safety Excellence Award:
- HealthPartners in Bloomington, MN, was honored for training its team of foreign language interpreters as patient safety advocates through didactic instruction and clinical simulation, enabling interpreters to identify and escalate safety concerns.
- BayCare HomeCare in Largo, FL, was honored for fostering an environment where safety event reporting was embraced as a proactive, valuable, non-punitive tool to improve patient safety.
Northern Arizona Healthcare won Honorable Mention for the Safety Excellence Award in 2023. They will be recognized as the 2025 winner during the ECRI and the ISMP PSO Annual Meeting on Nov 12, 2025.
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