2025 Innovation in Patient Safety & Quality Award: PeaceHealth Ketchikan Medical Center's Quality & Patient Safety and the City of Ketchikan Mobile Integrated Health (MIH)

AHHA is honored to present the 2025 Innovation in Patient Safety & Quality Award to PeaceHealth Ketchikan Medical Center's Quality & Patient Safety team, in collaboration with the City of Ketchikan’s Mobile Integrated Health team. This award is one of AHHA's annual Healthcare Champion Awards given to recognize individuals and teams taking progressive and effective steps to improve patient care and outcomes. Each year, awardees are selected from nominations submitted by member facilities across Alaska; we present the awards at our annual conference in September at a special awards luncheon.

In June 2024, the City of Ketchikan, in partnership with the Ketchikan Wellness Coalition and with funding from PeaceHealth, launched a Mobile Integrated Health (MIH) program. In December, PeaceHealth invited an MIH team member to join its Readmission Review Team meetings. Like many communities in Alaska and nationwide, frequent emergency department readmissions often involve the most vulnerable patients—those facing housing insecurity, mobility challenges, and multiple chronic conditions.

Including MIH in these discussions has given PeaceHealth a clearer picture of patients’ circumstances. Because MIH staff work directly in the community, they often know these patients personally and can share insights about living situations and other factors contributing to repeat hospital visits.

MIH is also able to follow-up with the patient upon discharge providing support such as picking up medications at the pharmacy for patients with mobility challenges, checking in with patients regularly to ensure they are being compliant with their medications, supporting wound care, and providing nutritional supplements to support healing. MIH has also helped intervene before patients’ conditions escalate to the point of an emergency; they often guide patients to PeaceHealth's Priority Care clinic (opened in October 2023) for same-day appointments for urgent but non-life-threatening needs.

While these are team efforts, the most impactful component has been the collaboration between PeaceHealth and Mobile Integrated Health and MIH’s ability to meet the patient where they are and address concerns in the moment before they become more severe. Their work has statistically reduced readmission and multi-visit patient rates over the last six month, with a prediction that trend will continue as layers of support have been added to these higher-risk patients.