Patient safety and innovation aren’t competing priorities. America’s hospitals are proving they can be achieved together, and the results are already saving lives.
Marc L. Boom, M.D.
President and CEO, Houston Methodist; Board Chair, American Hospital Association
Everyone in healthcare shares a goal: to keep patients safe. Patients expect and deserve care that is safe, high-quality, effective, and innovative. The truth is, we can only deliver on those expectations when safety comes first.
To do that, we must shift away from what I often describe as “or” thinking and move toward “and” thinking. Healthcare cannot be a choice between safe care or innovative care. It must be safe and high-quality and innovative and effective. When we think in terms of “and,” we change what is possible for our patients and the people who care for them.
Many of us entered healthcare because we felt a sacred call to help others. We have a responsibility to keep our patients safe at every step. Whether someone’s role is serving as a physician or nurse at the bedside, or hospital leadership shaping systemwide decisions, our goal is the same: deliver safe care.
Innovation in service of safety
Innovation plays an important role in helping us achieve this goal. Today, we have tools that help us provide safer, more effective care. For example, small wearable devices can monitor patient vitals in real time and send updates directly to nurses. This allows patients more uninterrupted time to heal and gives nurses more time to focus on what matters most: being there for patients.
Adopting innovative approaches may feel like a big shift, but change is essential to transforming care. Embracing it will help us address the external headwinds, including staffing shortages and payer pressures, that are coming our way. Using technology has never been about bringing in gadgets for their own sake. It’s about what these new, innovative tools make newly possible for our patients.
Hospitals across the country are working every day to expand those possibilities for both patients and care teams. At Houston Methodist, where I have the privilege of leading a nine-hospital system, our Center for Innovation pilots and implements technologies designed to improve safety and quality and give clinicians more time with their patients.
Hospitals leading the way
Across the country, other hospitals and health systems are also embracing innovation to advance patient safety. Here are a few examples:
- Baptist Health in Arkansas developed a free app called Hello Pregnancy in partnership with its Maternal Infant Health Outreach Worker Program. The app helps vulnerable mothers attend prenatal and postpartum appointments. Three-quarters of participating mothers delivered babies with healthy birth weights, and none experienced significant postpartum complications.
- Corewell Health in Michigan, which serves a largely rural population, launched a virtual ICU and other telehealth initiatives. Its Advanced Heart Failure team provides critical bedside and follow-up care, reducing both hospital length of stay and readmission rates.
- Ochsner Health in Louisiana developed a hospital-acquired pressure injury predictive model that identifies high-risk patients and alerts the care team to take preventive action.
These innovations help hospitals better serve their patients and communities, and we are seeing results. According to a Vizient analysis, hospitalized patients in the second quarter of 2025 were nearly 30% more likely to survive based on their underlying severity than similar patients in late 2019, even as today’s patients arrive sicker and with more complex conditions.
By continuing to embrace change and invest in innovative technologies, America’s hospitals and health systems will continue pursuing our most important goal: keeping patients safe.
