California Hospitals Launch Statewide Quality Institute, Hire CEO to Lead Patient Safety Efforts

A new not-for-profit, statewide organization aimed at strengthening hospital-based patient safety and quality improvement activities has been launched by the California Hospital Association (CHA) and the three affiliated Regional Associations.

The Hospital Quality Institute (HQI) will integrate into one streamlined organization all of the existing patient safety and quality improvement programs now underway through CHA, the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California (Hospital Council), the Hospital Association of Southern California (HASC) and the Hospital Association of San Diego and Imperial Counties (HASDIC).  Among the programs that will be incorporated into HQI will be the California Hospital Patient Safety Organization (CHPSO), Patient Safety First, the California Hospital Engagement Network (known as CalHEN) and other local and regional patient safety collaboratives.

The Institute, which is headquartered in Sacramento, is being led by newly hired CEO Julianne Morath, RN, MS. Morath, a nationally known expert in health care quality and patient safety with more than three decades of executive and academic experience, joined HQI in March.  Most recently, Morath served as the Chief Quality and Patient Safety Officer for Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.  She also has served in academic positions at the University of Cincinnati, Brown University, the University of Rhode Island and the University of Minnesota.

Prior to joining Vanderbilt, Morath served as the chief operating officer at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota and as a system vice president at Allina Health, both based in Minneapolis.  While in Minnesota, she was a founder of “Safest America,” a patient safety collaborative in the upper Midwest.

As a leading patient safety expert, Morath has participated in the Kennedy School of Government’s Executive Session on Medical Error and Patient Safety, based at Harvard University.  She also was selected as a Fellow to the Salzburg Global Seminar on Patient Safety, based in Salzburg, Austria.

Morath’s work in the patient safety arena has been featured on the cover of U.S. News & World Report and was the focus of two Harvard Business School case studies in leadership.

Morath holds a bachelor of nursing degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree from the University of California, San Francisco.  She completed doctoral course work in social psychology and program evaluation at the University of Cincinnati.

Morath serves on the boards of the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) and Virginia Mason Medical Center and Health System in Seattle.  She also is a member of the Board of Commissioners of The Joint Commission, and is a founding member of the Lucian Leape Institute at NPSF.

Morath is the author of two books on patient safety and quality improvement – “The Quality Advantage” and “To Do No Harm” – and is widely published on the topics of patient safety, quality, leadership and patient/family engagement.  She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal for Patient Safety and American Nurse Today.

Among her many awards, Morath was the inaugural recipient in 2001 of the John Eisenberg Award for Individual Lifetime Achievement in Patient Safety, awarded by The Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum.