In high-risk industries, safety is rarely determined by a single decision, policy, or individual. Instead, it emerges from thousands of daily choices made by people throughout an organization. Whether in a cockpit, an emergency department, or a boardroom, culture influences how people communicate, respond to uncertainty, learn from failure, and protect those they serve.

Drawing on experiences from military aviation, air medical transport, and healthcare leadership, this keynote will explore what separates organizations that merely talk about safety from those that truly live it. Through stories, lessons learned, and practical examples, participants will examine how leaders build trust, encourage speaking up, respond to mistakes, and create resilient organizations capable of learning and improving over time.

The principles are simple, but sustaining them is hard. This session will focus on how leaders can create the conditions for safety to flourish—not as a program or initiative, but as a core organizational value.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify leadership behaviors that strengthen or weaken safety culture.
2.  Explain how trust and psychological safety influence reporting and learning.
3. Describe strategies for sustaining safety culture during periods of change and operational pressure.

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Artificial intelligence is transforming what is possible in patient safety. The presenters bring a rare combination of operational and analytic expertise, and a passion for innovation.  The presenters will demonstrate what it means to move beyond event reporting toward true safety surveillance, bringing together multiple data sources and surfacing patterns that no single source could reveal. Drawing on a variety of techniques including natural language processing, machine learning, predictive modeling, and generative AI, the presenters will share their experiences deploying these approaches in ways that support safety leaders rather than overwhelm them. The presenters will share the careful, iterative thinking behind these approaches: how to validate algorithms, how to avoid oversimplifying complex safety data, and how to continuously work to ensure these tools strengthen rather than complicate the work of safety professionals.  The session will also look ahead to the next frontier in safety analytics, where intelligent systems can reason through complex data the way an experienced patient safety professional would, connecting signals, weighing context, and helping teams get ahead of harm before it occurs. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for thinking about AI as a co-pilot in patient safety, amplifying the insight and judgment of the people doing this essential work, not replacing them.

Learning Objectives:

1. Describe how AI and advanced analytic techniques can move patient safety from reactive event reporting to proactive surveillance across an organization.
2. Explain how analytic approaches can unlock staff capacity, reduce workarounds, and help safety leaders extract actionable information for improvement.
3. Articulate key principles for developing an organizational AI philosophy that drives innovation in patient safety while preserving the integrity of safety data and human judgment.

What if one of the most powerful tools for reducing harm in hospital care was simply changing who is in the room and how they interact during care planning discussions?

Interprofessional patient- and family-centered rounding models—including Patient- and Family-Centered I-PASS (PFC I-PASS) rounds—offer a structured, evidence-based approach to transforming how healthcare teams, patients, families, and care partners communicate during daily hospital rounds. By integrating required elements such as prerounds planning, shared mental model building, and attention to interpretation needs, these models enable rounds go beyond information exchange to place patients and families at the center of care discussions and decisions.

Hospitals that have implemented these models have found multiple beneficial results. For example, pediatric hospitals implementing PFC I-PASS have documented a 38% reduction in harmful medical errors, along with meaningful improvements in patient and family experience and reductions in adverse events. Yet translating this model into real-world hospital settings requires thoughtful adaptation, interprofessional commitment, and ongoing evaluation.

In this session, participants will hear firsthand experience in adapting and implementing PFC I-PASS rounds. Together, we will explore what PFC I-PASS rounds are and what the evidence tells us about their impact on safety and experience as well as how patients, families, and care partners can be meaningfully engaged as true partners rather than passive recipients in the rounding process.

Learning Objectives:

1. Describe how interprofessional patient- and family-centered rounds work, including the meaningful roles that patients, family members, and care partners play alongside healthcare team members.
2. Explain the evidence linking interprofessional patient- and family-centered rounding approaches to improved safety and patient experience;
3. Describe approaches to evaluating whether patient- and family-centered rounds are achieving meaningful improvements in safety outcomes (e.g. reduced medication errors, improved communication of safety concerns, prevention of adverse events) as well as patient and family experience

Maintaining continual readiness in a large system can be challenging. The S.M.A.R.T (staff maintaining accreditation readiness together) Program utilizes rounding tools that provide real-time, consistent, resources to facilitate continual readiness for accreditation, quality, and safety risk points that lead to meaningful conversation and immediate feedback to improve patient care. The SMART program standardizes rounding with purpose, promotes quality conversations, and maintains continual readiness.

Learning Objectives:

1. Describe the purpose and structure of the S.M.A.R.T. Continual Readiness Program, including how Kamishibai-based tools (Resource, Task, Reference, and Survey Theme Cards) support accreditation and regulatory compliance.
2. Explain how S.M.A.R.T. rounding tools promote real-time feedback and standardization, improving staff knowledge, accountability, and adherence to high-risk, low-frequency processes.
3. Apply S.M.A.R.T. tools to support continual readiness efforts, including integrating cards into daily workflows, reinforcing regulatory requirements, and identifying opportunities to improve patient safety and quality outcomes

Dr. Adams, the 20th US Surgeon General, will give a “fire side chat” to open the conference. You’re encouraged to submit a question or topic before the presentation by emailing WPSC@qualityhealth.org, Subject: Dr. Adams.

Learning Objectives:

1. Explore impact of social, economic, and healthcare system challenges on patient outcomes and provider well-being during periods of uncertainty and change.
2. Identify strategies to improve resilience, adaptability, and equitable healthcare delivery in rapidly evolving clinical environments.
3. Discuss innovative approaches and collaborative solutions that promote sustainable health advancement for patients, providers, and communities during turbulent times.

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We are experiencing an unprecedented decline in vaccination rates. Effective communication begins with understanding where patients get their information and how they feel about it. People trust people, and they’re not going to necessarily trust a name on an organization. A lot of the work that we have to do is to get science away from an institutional stamp or a journal stamp, and have it communicated by people that are trusted by patients.  The presentation will review evidence based methods of increasing vaccination rates.

Learning Objectives:

1. Recognize challenges with different communication strategies
2. Describe best practices for communicating about vaccines
3. Develop a plan for how to best communicate with parents about vaccines

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The Vaccine Integrity Project was formed in 2025 to promote the continued grounding of immunization policies and programs in the best available science and focused on optimizing protection of individuals, families, and communities against vaccine-preventable diseases. During its exploratory phase, the Vaccine Integrity Project collected and synthesized feedback from stakeholders with a diverse range of experience, including public health, academia, industry, insurers and payers, medical associations, community organizations, and others. Key themes from these discussions resulted in several high-level recommendations to be achieved across organizations and initiatives.

These recommendations include:

• Strengthening communication and improving information dissemination for today’s environment
• Developing and disseminating clinical tools and guidelines
• Building an overarching coalition for strategy and alignment
• Maintaining the nation’s vaccine infrastructure
• Stabilizing the vaccine safety system
• Providing assistance to state and local health departments
• Safeguarding insurance coverage
• Continuing the flow of data for decision-making
• Read our full report summarizing findings from the exploratory phase.

Eileen Kasda, DrPH, MHS is a nationally recognized patient safety leader, innovator, and educator with nearly two decades of experience at the intersection of safety, analytics, and technology. As President and a founder of SafeTower, a Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute spinout, and founder of the Healthcare Event Reporting Collaborative (HERC), she has dedicated her career to transforming how healthcare organizations detect, interpret, and act on patient safety risk. She conceived the vision for HERO and a growing suite of patient safety solutions that harness advanced analytics to transform how health systems gather, analyze, and act on safety data, and has dedicated herself to evangelizing next generation approaches to patient safety as a thought leader, speaker, and innovator. A thought leader who thinks ahead of the field, she challenges existing paradigms and builds the tools, communities, and coalitions necessary to advance a true culture of safety. Named to Becker’s Hospital Review patient safety experts list for three consecutive years, her work has earned recognition from ECRI and the Maryland Patient Safety Center. Dr. Kasda serves as a Johns Hopkins faculty member.
ekasda@safetower.com

Christine Robson, MSN, RN, is the Director of Products and Services at SafeTower and former Patient Safety Manager at Johns Hopkins Health System. She led the landmark rollout of HERO across all Johns Hopkins Medicine facilities beginning in April 2021, and has since played a central role in building SafeTower’s growing suite of patient safety solutions — including event reporting, patient complaints and grievances, and event investigation products. Christine bridges the gap between advanced analytics and real-world application, working closely with SafeTower’s data science team to ensure analytic capabilities are operationalized in ways that are intuitive and meaningful across diverse user needs. Her approach to integrating data across solutions is helping define a new standard for how the industry thinks about safety analytics. Christine holds a Master of Science in Nursing as an Adult-Gerontological Clinical Nurse Specialist from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing.
Crobson@SafeTower.com

Asa Adadey, MS, is a Data Scientist and Health Informaticist whose expertise spans natural language processing, machine learning, and mixed methods analytics applied to healthcare safety. His background ranges from genomics and systems biology to supply chain optimization, giving him a uniquely broad lens for identifying risk signals across complex datasets. He was instrumental in designing HERO at Johns Hopkins Health System and has since built the advanced analytic foundation underlying SafeTower’s growing suite of patient safety solutions — developing frameworks that integrate data across event reporting, patient complaints and grievances, and event investigation to surface insights that help leaders not just identify and respond to safety risks, but build more effective safety programs. Asa holds a Master of Science in Computational and Systems Biology from MIT.
aadadey@SafeTower.com

Erin Blakeney PhD, RN is a nurse scientist whose research focuses on understanding and improving how patients, families, care teams, and health systems work together—with a particular emphasis on people living with serious and complex illnesses. Drawing on implementation science, interprofessional team science, and patient-oriented research methods, her work focuses on bridging gaps between evidence and real-world hospital care.

Dr. Blakeney has received grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other funders. This work has generated foundational knowledge about adapting, implementing, and sustaining interprofessional, patient- and family-centered rounding models for patients hospitalized with advanced heart failure. Her work integrates qualitative, quantitative, and health systems data to understand how care practices vary across settings — and how to improve them.

Dr. Blakeney is a Research Associate Professor at the University of Washington School of Nursing where she also co-leads the Team Science Core for the Institute of Translational Health Sciences. She collaborates closely with patients, families, and community partners to ensure her research reflects the perspectives of those it is designed to serve.
erin2@uw.edu

Ivy Dacones, MBA, RRT, is Senior Director of Patient Safety and Regulatory Readiness at St. Luke’s Health System and a recognized subject matter expert in quality and regulatory readiness. She has led the implementation of a comprehensive regulatory readiness program, including the SMART continual readiness approach, acknowledged by The Joint Commission as a best practice. With a clinical foundation as a respiratory therapist and advanced training in health systems management and Lean Six Sigma, Ivy brings a unique blend of clinical expertise and operational discipline. She is a trusted advisor on regulatory interpretation and a passionate advocate for safety as the foundation of compliance. Known for her clarity, collaboration, and results-driven leadership, Ivy has consistently advanced high reliability practices and guided teams in responding to complex patient safety events across the health care continuum.
daconeiv@slhs.org

Jerome Adams, MD is a former Indiana State Health Commissioner and the 20th US Surgeon General, and currently serves as Executive Director of Health Empowerment Initiatives and the Center for Community Health Enhancement and Learning (HEAL) at Purdue University.  In these roles he has promoted public policies to promote mental health and wellness, and address substance misuse.

As the 20th U.S. Surgeon General and a prior member of the President’s Coronavirus task force, Dr. Adams has been at the forefront of America’s most pressing health challenges. A regular communicator via tv, radio, and print, Dr. Adams is an expert not just in the science, but also in communicating the science to the lay public and making it relevant to various audiences.
adams616@purdue.edu

A good catch award program is a simple intervention with a big ROI. This presentation explores how to implement and measure a program for success.

Learning objectives:

1. Implement structured good catch program and measurements for success.
2.  Identify critical safety behaviors highlighted in the program.
3. Verbalize culture impacts.

Dr. Lori Handy is an Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and an Attending Physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). She received her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania and then completed her residency in Pediatrics and fellowship in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Her early career was rooted in clinical operations, including roles in Antimicrobial Stewardship and Infection Prevention and Control. Near the end of the pandemic, she turned her attention to vaccine education and became Associate Director of the Vaccine Education Center at CHOP. There, she works primarily to share science-based, current information about vaccines with providers through multimedia approaches, while also teaching how to best communicate this information to patients and families.
HANDYL@chop.edu

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