Delivering Safe, Quality Care to Patients Is the Top Priority for Hospitals and Health Systems

The 2025 AHA Leadership Summit wrapped up on July 22, and as always, it was energizing and inspiring to connect with so many talented and dedicated people whose passion and vision for health care promise great things for the future.

But even as we heard new ideas about innovative approaches shaping care delivery today, we know that all these exciting advancements will never take anyone’s eye off the true North Star of health care: quality and patient safety.

Delivering safe, high quality care to patients remains hospitals’ top priority and is at the center of everything they do. The AHA continues to play a key role in leading and supporting the field by developing new resources, spreading innovative initiatives and strategies, and highlighting outstanding efforts through national recognition programs.

One way we do this is through the AHA’s Patient Safety Initiative, which was launched in 2023 to catalyze, convene and connect members around patient safety while helping lift up your own powerful stories. This initiative focuses on providing hospitals with tools and data to advance patient safety, offers a platform for sharing their stories of improvement with peers and highlights examples of innovation that support, spread and sustain safety improvement.

As part of the initiative, this week we announced a collaboration with the health care technology company Epic to help more hospitals adopt a set of tools to aid in the detection and treatment of postpartum hemorrhage — a serious and potentially life-threatening complication of childbirth that accounts for 11% of maternal deaths in the United States. Point-of-care tools in electronic health records can help health care providers prevent, detect and treat postpartum hemorrhage, ultimately saving lives and improving care for mothers across America.

This work builds on the AHA’s Better Health for Mothers and Babies Initiative, which provides a wide array of resources to help hospitals and health care systems play a key role in improving maternal and infant outcomes. 

Hospitals and health systems do some of their most important learning from each other. Sharing best practices, ideas and experiences that have succeeded in improving health and safety outcomes is one of the best ways to advance health for our field.

Throughout the Leadership Summit, we hosted many workshops and sessions focused on quality and patient safety. We heard from hospital and health system leaders about how cutting-edge artificial intelligence is transforming the patient and clinical experience, how employee engagement is a driver of safety, quality and the patient experience of care, and how to integrate storytelling into patient safety efforts.

We also recognized several hospitals and health systems with AHA awards, including AHA’s Quest for Quality Prize, which honors exceptional health care leadership and innovation in improving quality and advancing health in America’s communities.

Health care ultimately is about people caring for other people. While hospitals and health systems continue to make progress advancing quality and safety, we know that the journey is far from over. As we navigate the challenging road ahead with exciting opportunities to advance clinical care, even with its unpredictable twists and turns, quality and patient safety will always be our guide.