Quality Advisor

World Patient Safety Day 2025

Today, on World Patient Safety Day, we’re proud to share a new white paper from ECRI that captures the voices of 17 C-suite health care leaders who are redefining what it means to lead for safety in today’s complex environment.

Through four national roundtables, these leaders—representing integrated health systems, children’s hospitals, rural providers and national associations—shared unfiltered insights into what’s truly moving the needle on patient safety and organizational resilience.

Download the white paper to explore how these strategies are helping organizations navigate today’s challenges while building safer, more sustainable systems for tomorrow.

Let’s honor World Patient Safety Day by learning from one another—and leading with safety.

September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month

We're raising awareness for Suicide Prevention month through our Caring for Wisconsin’s Caregivers initiative. Please visit ALL IN for Mental Health for Suicide Prevention Month and check out The Six Actions to help prevent suicide.

~All in for Mental Health Handout

~All in for Mental Health Postcard

Falls Prevention Week is September 22 - 26

The National Council on Aging aims to raise awareness that falls are preventable, especially for older adults. Here are some resources:

• Falls Free Wisconsin
• Falls Free Wisconsin Coalition
• CDC STEADI - Older Adult Fall Prevention
• WHA Health Care Quality Resource Center

If your hospital has falls prevention promotions, please feel free to email your photos to our quality mailbox and we will share on social media.

WHA's project was awarded 2nd place!WHA Quality Presents at Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Grantee Learning Event

On Sept. 9, Casey Zimpel, WHA Quality Improvement Manager, presented on the Integrity for Data Equity and Accuracy (IDEA) initiative at the AHW Grantee Learning Event. With 40 entries at the event, participants voted and WHA's project ranked second.

Accurate demographic data are essential for identifying health disparities and providing equitable care, yet a Wisconsin audit found wide variation in patient’s demographic data collection. IDEA addresses these gaps by strengthening staff training, patient communication and electronic health records (EHR) workflows to improve the collection of race, ethnicity, language (REaL) and sexual orientation/gender identity (SO/GI) data. By building workforce capacity and aligning with national data modernization efforts, IDEA helps ensure demographic data accurately reflect the communities our health systems serve.

(L - R): Samantha Larrabee, Patient Connection Center Assistant Manager, Patient Connection Center, Beaver Dam, and Casey Zimpel, WHAZimpel also recently had the opportunity to collaborate with Marshfield Medical Center – Beaver Dam to support staff education on the critical role of accurate demographic data collection in identifying health disparities and advancing equitable care.

WHA is working in collaboration with Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin (AHW) Community-Led Seed Grant, along with funding from the Greater Watertown Community Health Foundation, to support the IDEA initiative. This initiative aims to improve demographic data accuracy in health care settings.

This initiative is a step toward eliminating gaps in health outcomes by empowering frontline teams with the knowledge and tools to collect and use data responsibly and respectfully. When we strengthen our systems, we strengthen our care.

For more IDEA resources, go to the Health Care Quality Resource Center.

2025 Wisconsin Quality Residency Program Kicks Off

The 2025-26 cohort of the Wisconsin Quality Residency program kicked off September 10. The in-person learning module topic, "Leading as a Quality Healthcare Professional," featured presentations by Wisconsin hospital quality leaders, Lori Haack, Director of Quality and Patient Safety, UW Health, Joy Keller, Vice President Quality & Safety, Tamarack Health and Dawn Moeller, Quality Manager-North Region-Minocqua and Park Falls, Marshfield Clinic Health System. This 10-month program is a combination of in-person and virtual sessions and covers many quality-related topics, including regulatory requirements, risk management, data reporting and quality improvement methods.

Participants in this year's full program represent 10 Wisconsin hospitals/health systems. Sponsored by the Wisconsin Office of Rural Health (WORH), the program is a collaboration between the Wisconsin Hospital Association (WHA) and the Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative (RWHC).

See Wisconsin Quality Residency Program for more information or email Jenny Pritchett.

WI Dental Pain Protocol

WHA's partnership with the Wisconsin Dental Pain Protocol (WDPP) continues to offer high quality, provider-level content concerning best practices in emergency department dental care. So far, 147 providers have received a WDPP dental nerve block training and more than 50% of patients seen in WDPP-participating Emergency Departments (ED) receive definitive dental care after their ED visit. We also see a drop in repeat ED visits for non-traumatic dental pain for the sites that have implemented the program for more than two years. Additionally, in response to a 2024 DHS report that inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions are on the rise in Wisconsin ED's, WHA/WDPP developed a new training module on accurate dental diagnosis and appropriate use of antibiotics for dental complaints. The training highlights non-infectious dental diagnoses that are not commonly included in medical school curriculum like exostosis, pericoronitis and fibroepithelial polyps. Dr. Bobby Redwood--a WHA physician improvement advisor--is currently presenting the content to emergency providers throughout Wisconsin.

The new WDPP website has launched and is the definitive source for a systemic approach to treating non-traumatic dental pain, assuring ideal pain control practices, supporting antibiotic stewardship and reducing recidivism for oral pain. The first section, Implementation Tools, contains operational resources, including brief videos and documents to secure organization and community buy-in, identify leaders, train providers, set up referral processes, monitor progress, launch and maintain the WDPP. The second section, On-Shift Clinical Tools, contains short videos and reference documents supporting real-time support for diagnosis, non-opioid and opioid pain control, local anesthetics and antibiotics.