Voices of U of U Health
Forward Together: Putting Patients at the Center of Quality Care
By Kencee Graves, MD, and Mari Ransco, MA
This is the third blog in a multi-part series discussing how University of Utah Health is taking steps to become an integrated academic health system achieving unsurpassed societal impact. The series highlights six shared goals guiding our collective vision for 2030.
Quality and patient-centeredness have always been part of who we are at University of Utah Health. For 16 straight years, we’ve been nationally recognized as a top performer in delivering safe, high-quality care. These honors are a point of pride for our teams and a reflection of the dedication our caregivers bring every day.
But awards and rankings aren’t the goal in themselves. What truly matters is what they represent: our promise to provide exceptional care centered around our patients and their families for every person we serve.
Why Quality and Patient Experience Always Matters
High-quality care isn’t a one-time or annual achievement. It’s something we have to earn every day. That means not only celebrating what we do well but also continuing to reflect on and refine our processes to keep improving.
As part of our 2030 strategic goals, we know we need to strengthen areas like:
- Patient identification and safety, where even small errors can create big risks. High-quality health care starts with ensuring our patients are correctly identified. Initiatives like our 3Vs standard—Visualize, Verbalize, Verify—are designed to reduce those risks and keep every patient safe.
- Capturing comorbidities in both medical and surgical populations, where we currently trail many of our peer academic medical centers. Accurate, complete documentation of how complicated our patients are helps us deliver the right care and demonstrate the true complexity of the patients we serve.
- Patient experience, where we make a meaningful difference when every moment matters. When we focus on empathetic communication, clear care coordination, and teamwork, we strengthen our relationships to improve health outcomes.
University of Utah Health’s legacy of high-quality care is incredible and worth celebrating. The dedication of our teams to providing the best care is inspiring. Let’s keep building on this momentum and striving for excellence.
Our Goal: Top-Tier in Every Setting
Looking ahead, we want to achieve top-tier status for both inpatient and outpatient quality of care in the Vizient Quality & Accountability Study.
Why? Because reaching that level means we are consistently delivering on the two things patients expect most:
- Safe, reliable, evidence-based care, no matter the setting. Our goal is to improve the health and well-being of our patients and our community. To do this, we strive for excellence across the care continuum. This means delivering compassionate, personal, and evidence-based care at every stage, from prevention through treatment and recovery.
- An exceptional experience where every patient and their family members feel heard, respected, and included in their care.
This dual focus—quality plus patient experience—is how we’ll make sure every patient leaves our system not only healthier but also confident in the care they received.
Measuring What Matters: Care, Ease, and Trust
To truly improve patient experience, we need to measure it in ways that reflect what patients value most. At U of U Health, we use a simple but powerful framework built around three pillars: Care, Ease, and Trust.
- Care means knowing our patients as people, not just diagnoses. It means compassion and empathy at every touchpoint. It’s about courtesy, listening, explaining, and showing concern not just for a patient’s condition but also for their comfort, emotional well-being, and personal goals. When patients say they felt cared for, it reflects both the science of medicine and the art of human connection.
- Ease reflects how simple we make it for patients to get the care they need. That includes reducing and explaining delays, making scheduling easier, improving responsiveness, and ensuring instructions before and after care are clear. Health care is complex, but patients shouldn’t feel the burden of that complexity.
- Trust is the foundation of every healing relationship. Patients place immense trust in us, and we build on that by being transparent, respectful, and inclusive of their families and caregivers. It also means seamless coordination across teams and services, so patients never feel like they’re being handed off without support.
By focusing on these three dimensions, we can track progress in ways that are both measurable and meaningful. These dimensions also account for 15% of our top-tier status in the Vizient Quality & Accountability study.
How We’ll Get There
Achieving this vision takes more than policies and metrics—it takes people. Thousands of caregivers, staff, and leaders across U of U Health are part of this effort. Together we are:
- Embedding patient safety practices like 3Vs into everyday workflows. Building a safety culture means speaking up when a process doesn’t feel safe or reliable, and supporting opportunities to improve practices.
- Partnering with physicians, nurses, and staff to improve infection prevention, care across the continuum, and documentation accuracy.
- Setting unit-level patient experience goals—from communication about medications to responsiveness—so that improvement is driven at the front line.
- Using Care, Ease, and Trust as guideposts for every interaction, ensuring our measurements reflect what matters most to patients.
- Working hand in hand with patients and communities to co-design care that feels compassionate, coordinated, and accessible.
Each of these steps moves us closer to making high-quality, patient-centered care the standard in every clinic, hospital, and program.
A Culture of Continuous Improvement
We’re proud of the recognition we’ve received, but what inspires us most is the opportunity to keep improving for our patients and our community. While rankings are a helpful measure of how we’re performing as a system, the most important measure is the trust patients instill in us to deliver the best care possible. We honor and grow that trust by always looking for ways to do better.
Forward Together means never standing still. It means building on our strengths, tackling opportunities with humility, and keeping patients at the center of everything we do. With that commitment, we’ll continue to raise the bar—not for the sake of recognition but for the people and communities who depend on us every day.
We Want to Hear from You
What ideas do you have for keeping our care high-quality and patient-centered? Share them at Together@hsc.utah.edu. Every idea helps us move closer to the care our patients deserve.
