HAP Achievement Awards: St. Luke’s University Health Network

June 06, 2025

HAP's annual Achievement Awards honor hospitals and health systems for their innovation, creativity, and commitment to patient care. The Achievement Awards showcase and share member hospitals’ and health systems’ successful programs and best practices.

St. Luke’s University Health Network received the In Safe Hands Award for applying data-driven strategies to identify at-risk patients and enhance care outcomes.

Here’s what you need to know:

• The challenge:  Delayed recognition of clinical deterioration resulted in missed opportunities for early intervention and increased failure-to-rescue events.
• Taking Action:  A real-time predictive model embedded in the electronic health record (EHR) continuously analyzed clinical data to detect early signs of patient deterioration, triggering tiered alerts and coordinated responses from nursing, supervisors, and rapid response teams to enable timely intervention and reduce failure-to-rescue events.
• Results:  Implementing a real-time deterioration prediction model led to a 14.6 percent reduction in inpatient cardiac arrests, higher survival-to-discharge rates across care settings, fewer unanticipated transfers, and more than $2.8 million in annualized financial gains.
• Advancing Care:  Highlighting the model’s role in advancing health equity, the team noted, “The DI model promotes fairness and equity by relying on objective, data-driven criteria to assess patient needs rather than subjective judgment, which can be influenced by unconscious biases.”

Congratulations to St. Luke’s University Health Network for its outstanding efforts to improve patient safety. Learn more about the project online.

Questions about the HAP Achievement Awards may be directed to HAP Member Services at (717) 561-5359.