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/

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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