Becker's Hospital Review

18 CLINICAL LEADERSHIP Loyola Medicine CEO: Demand hospital boards prioritize safety, quality By Paige Twenter S afety, quality and financial performance are inseparable for hospitals — and boards of directors and C-suites need to act on all three, according to Shawn Vincent, president and CEO of Maywood, Ill.-based Loyola Medicine and St. Joseph Health System. During Becker's 16th Annual Meeting, Mr. Vincent equated safety and quality outcomes to financial performance. "Everything you're doing from a safety and quality standpoint is just as important as my bottom-line numbers," Mr. Vincent said. "We need to demand that from each one of our organizations." For example, Loyola Medicine's MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn, Ill., has supported a temporary respite program for people without housing since 2019. e program is at Sojourner House in Oak Park, Ill., which offers discharged patients a safe place to recover before transitioning to long-term supportive housing. "Certainly it's much more cost effective to have them at a location like that, but it's also morally the right thing to do. I know that's hard to hear a CEO say that, but it's true," said Mr. Vincent, who also serves as president of Trinity Health's Illinois and Indiana region. "It's not always about money. But we also have to be realists." For the last eight years, he said his five-hospital system has cared for the highest acuity of patients in Illinois. With compounding stressors in the healthcare industry, from lacking behavioral health resources to ongoing supply chain disruptions, Mr. Vincent emphasized the importance of approaching safety and quality improvement like any major operational initiative — with clear goals, reliable data, strong champions and measurable outcomes. He pointed to needlestick injuries as one example of data-driven problem-solving. Aer a deep dive into the system's supply chain, his team discovered that 40% of needlesticks traced back to a single syringe product that had been inconsistently swapped between sites due to shortages. Mr. Vincent also urged health system leaders to better communicate the financial value of safety improvements to their boards — an argument he said the industry has historically underdeveloped. Reductions in sepsis rates, shorter lengths of stay and fewer preventable complications all carry measurable financial impact while also freeing up capacity. "I don't think we've done a good job historically of packaging this and selling it as a whole," he said. "at's on all of us. We've got to figure out a better way to do that." n The patient safety 'iceberg': What reporting dashboards miss By Mackenzie Bean H ealth system leaders have built increasingly sophisticated infrastructure for tracking and improving patient safety outcomes. Yet, a visibility gap remains that data alone can't close: the near misses, workarounds and bedside observations that never make it into the reporting pipeline at all. "Absence of harm does not equate to the presence of safety," Amrita Gupte, MD, chief medical officer at Mount Sinai Queens, part of New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System, said during Becker's 16th Annual Meeting. "We see just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many near misses and great catches that don't get reported — and we lose that opportunity to learn from those incidents." While it's difficult to quantify the true toll of near misses and any potential underreporting, federal data suggests the gap between what gets documented and what actually happens is significant — even for actual harm events. A 2025 report from HHS' Office of Inspector General found hospitals failed to capture 49% of harm events. About 46% of these incidents were not captured because staff did not consider them to be patient harm, but rather known complications or side effects. The same blind spot can extend beyond reporting culture into how health systems monitor newly deployed technology, according to Dr. Gupte. "We don't do a good job measuring the workarounds," she said. A governance committee can approve a tool, implementation can go smoothly and leadership can see nothing alarming in the data, even while the tool is quietly generating unintended consequences — such as alarm fatigue or workflows that add clicks — that no one is tracking. The takeaway for clinical executives isn't to distrust the data. It's to treat a quiet dashboard or smooth technology rollout as a question rather than an answer. If the numbers look clean and nothing is coming through the reporting pipeline, the more productive response may be to ask what's not being said, and why. n

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