2025 Innovation in Patient Safety & Quality Award: Quality Team, Norton Sound Regional Hospital

AHHA is honored to present the 2025 Innovation in Patient Safety & Quality Award to the Quality Team at Norton Sound Regional Hospital. 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.

This award recognizes the Quality Team at Norton Sound Health Corporation (NSHC) for their development of an innovative process to engage patients and their families in health care maintenance through personalized notifications of screenings, vaccinations, and lifestyle changes.

The team is comprised of two physician assistants, one nurse practitioner, one admin assistant, and four student interns. In May 2024, they collaboratively brainstormed, researched, and eventually settled on a new outreach plan for the ~10,000 patients in the NSHC catchment area, all living off the road system and with various levels of network connectivity. They embarked on designing and sending personalized birthday cards by mail to patients of all ages inscribed with age-appropriate vaccination information, routine health maintenance reminders, and cleverly worded lifestyle modification messaging.  The team’s interns design the cards, the advanced practice providers create the health messaging and pull patients' due list for preventative care, and then the interns and admin assistant mail the cards out each month, taking the time to individually mark each patient’s care needs. This is truly a team process that requires all members' roles in order to function effectively. 

Since June of 2024, over 7,299 individual cards have been mailed out. Though full data is forthcoming, there is already a noted uptick documented in several key indicators including an increase in the number of patients fully vaccinated by age two from 21% in 2023 to 24% in 2024, along with an increase in screening rates for cervical, breast and colon cancers. The team has also received lots of positive feedback from the region’s residents and anticipate continued success and data as proof of concept.