Mayo Clinic Key In To Quality

Workplace violence remains a significant safety challenge in healthcare. In this episode of Key in to Quality, Mayo Clinic experts explore whether clinical knowledge, operational data and predictive analytics can help care teams identify behavioral risk earlier and provide support before a situation escalates.
The conversation highlights ROVR, or Reduced Occupational Violence Rates, a program that combines early identification with individualized behavior plans, clear communication and staff engagement. Experts discuss how a predictive model can bring together information already documented during routine care to help trained professionals recognize patterns and focus preventive services where they may be most helpful.
The episode also explores what responsible implementation requires, including evaluating how models perform across different practice settings, engaging clinical and operational partners and monitoring performance as data and workflows change.
Throughout the discussion, experts emphasize that analytics support, rather than replace, clinical judgment. A higher risk indication does not label a patient or mean harm is certain. Instead, the goal is compassionate, nonpunitive intervention that may help prevent harm while improving the care environment for patients and staff.
Hosted by Timothy Morgenthaler, MD and Sheri Nemec.
Guests:
Bethany Hall, Clinical Social Worker, Mayo Clinic Arizona
Maggie Paul, Ph.D., Health Care Delivery Research, Kern Center for the Science Of Health Care Delivery, Mayo Clinic
Patrick Wilson, Principal Data Science Analyst, Kern Center for the Science Of Health Care Delivery, Mayo Clinic
Kimberly Melton, Clinical Social Worker, Mayo Clinic Arizona

Host: Timothy Morgenthaler, M.D. | https://www.linkedin.com/in/timorgenthaler/
Host: Sheri Nemec| https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheryl-sheri-nemec-a627982a/
#mayokeyintoquality

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

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