The Joint Commission and NQF have announced the 2024 Eisenberg Award recipients, recognizing national, local, and individual achievements in patient safety and healthcare quality.

The Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum (NQF) have named the recipients of the 2024 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Awards, which recognize major contributions to improving healthcare safety and outcomes.

Awards are presented in three categories, and winners are selected by a panel of national patient safety and quality experts. The 2024 honorees are:

  • National Level Innovation in Patient Safety and Quality: CommonSpirit Health, Chicago, for its innovative approach to achieving and sustaining clinical excellence
  • Local Level Innovation in Patient Safety and Quality: Parkland Health, Dallas, for identifying and preventing missed opportunities for diagnosis
  • Individual Achievement: Elliott K. Main, MD, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California

The awards, established in 2002, honor the legacy of John M. Eisenberg, MD, MBA, a former administrator of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and a founding NQF board member.

“CommonSpirit Health, Parkland Health and Dr Elliott K. Main are proving what’s possible when a commitment to patient safety and quality is applied to new, innovative ways of approaching challenges that are facing our industry,” says Jonathan B. Perlin, MD, PhD, president and chief executive officer, The Joint Commission and Joint Commission International, in a release. “By working toward a future where patients and staff everywhere experience the safest, highest quality care across all healthcare settings, the recipients of the 2024 Eisenberg Awards are setting new benchmarks and inspiring future leaders to advance innovation in safety and quality.”

Recognizing Systemwide Improvements in Care

CommonSpirit Health was honored for implementing 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 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.

Improving Diagnosis Through Data and AI

Parkland Health was honored for developing a 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 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%.

A Career Spent Advancing Maternal Health

Elliott K. Main, MD, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at 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. 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.

The 2024 Eisenberg Award winners will be recognized at UNIFY 2025: Convening for Quality, to be held Sept. 16-17 in Washington, DC. Their work will also be profiled in a special issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety later this year.

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