GPBCH was thrilled to have hosted our launch meeting this fall for our newest Delaware Hospital Quality & Safety Learning Collaborative which took place on September 16, 2025. The intent of this collaborative is to leverage quality and safety data, such as that from the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, to improve patient outcomes in the Delaware population. Along with improving outcomes, it is our hope that this collaborative will contribute to reducing costs to avoidable medical errors and harm as well. In order to achieve this, we have recruited five hospitals including Bayealth (Kent and Sussex campuses), Beebe Healthcare, Saint Francis Hospital, and TidalHealth Nanticoke, from across the state of Delaware. GPBCH will work with the participants in this collaborative over the next two years through quarterly convenings that focus on cohort high performers sharing their best practices, hearing from national and regional experts on relevant Leapfrog Hospital Survey measures, as well as performing data analyses for our Delaware cohort.
At this initial Launch Meeting, GPBCH was pleased to welcome 20+ attendees from participating Delaware hospitals as well as various healthcare organizations such as the Medical Society of Delaware and DE Health Information Network as relevant stakeholders. For this meeting, we heard a conversation from speakers, Jean-Luc Tilly of The Leapfrog Group and Aaron Schrader of DE Statewide Benefits Office, who discussed how an employer utilizes the data, safety grades, and scoring from the Leapfrog Hospital Survey in their communications to employees. Additionally, we heard about the improvements the Leapfrog Survey has tracked for maternal measures, such as tracking the decrease of Early Elective Deliveries and Episiotomies over the past decade as well as sharing a future priority for Leapfrog including their measure quality of care in the Emergency Department. Our final speaker was Lindsey Schapiro from Peterson Health Technology Institute who talked about the importance of digital health solutions and their work at PHTI to evaluate such technologies and platforms to inform employers of their options while also sharing about Artificial Intelligence’s growing role in digital technologies.
Throughout the evening, attendees participated in discussion with their peers that focused on three main questions of: 1) What they want to accomplish at their organization through this collaborative, 2) What topics and areas of focus do they want to receive education on, and 3) What organizations and speakers do they want to hear from in forthcoming programming. GPBCH also surveyed attendees after the meeting in an effort to collect responses from those that could not join the meeting in-person. We are sharing responses below to these questions.
- Attendees want to walk away with:
- Having learned best practices
- Improving organizational awareness about quality & safety (everyone from frontline workers to c-suite)
- Networking with peer organizations
- Attendees want to be educated on:
- Implementing Leapfrog Informed Consent measure
- Leapfrog Emergency Department measures
- Artificial intelligence
- Workforce staffing in quality & safety departments and nurses’ retention
- Pressures on decreasing cost
- How to become a High Reliability Organization
- Accomplishing through-put (ER to inpatient)
- Attendees want to hear from:
- The Leapfrog Group
- DEHA
- AI/EPIC
- QLARANT
- Their high-performing peers on Leapfrog
Lastly, we asked attendees about any other aspects of the collaborative that they would like to inform. They shared that they preferred daytime or morning meetings, they’d like a networking document to be shared among collaborative participants, and that they want to promote transparency throughout Delaware by sharing success stories among their peer organizations. GPBCH is looking forward to bringing together the Collaborative on January 7, 2026 for the next virtual program. For more information on this program, please feel free to reach out to Tanika Smith (tsmith@gpbch.org) or Liz Owens (eowens@gpbch.org).