Hospitals Continue to Improve Performance on Key Patient Safety Measures, Outcomes in 2025

Keeping patients safe is the top priority of America’s hospitals and health systems. New data show that hospitals’ and health systems’ relentless focus on safety and quality improvement is paying off for patients and communities.

In September 2024, the American Hospital Association (AHA) published a report powered by Vizient® that demonstrated hospital and health system performance on key patient safety and quality measures was better in Q1 2024 than it was in Q4 2019.

The AHA and Vizient collaborated this year to examine the same set of measures. The findings show that as of Q2 2025 performance overall continues to improve.

Key Findings

Insights

Hospitals and health systems work every day to advance patient safety and quality of care. This report reflects the strength of a long-standing commitment and highlights the continued dedication of hospital teams nationwide to improving care and outcomes for the patients and communities they serve. The AHA continues to support hospitals and health systems in these efforts by sharing strategies, innovations and best practices that drive continued improvements. Visit AHA’s Patient Safety Initiative webpage for resources and examples of programs that hospitals and health systems across the country have implemented to advance quality and safety.

About the Data

To produce this report, AHA partnered with Vizient, an independent, third-party, multi-faceted organization that supports hospitals and health systems in their efforts to efficiently deliver high quality care.

The primary analyses were entirely performed by Vizient team members and were powered by data from hospitals that routinely report clinical information to the Vizient Clinical Data Base (CDB). The CDB contains information on more than 1,300 hospitals, submitted within 30 days prior to the end of each quarter. This provides real-time feedback to the participating hospitals and allows them to benchmark their performance against that of other general, acute care hospitals. Data from the Vizient Clinical Data Base was used with permission of Vizient, Inc. All rights reserved. The report is available on AHA’s and Vizient’s websites.

Vizient receives data on more than 10 million inpatients and 180 million outpatients annually. To analyze the trends from pre-pandemic through Q2 2025, Vizient identified a cohort of 705 general, acute care hospitals for which it had a complete dataset from Q4 2019 through Q2 2025. These hospitals represent the wide spectrum of hospitals across 49 states and the District of Columbia, and range in size from approximately 20 beds to over 1,500 beds, including the ranges outlined below in Table 1. Of note, 10 hospitals analyzed in the original September 2024 cohort were not eligible for inclusion in this follow-up analysis.

*Percentages do not add up to 100% due to rounding.