Agenda

7 – 8 a.m.

Breakfast

8 – 9 a.m.

Quality first: How boards make safety the organization’s top priority

• Vikki Choate, DNP, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, CPHQ, CPPS, Principal, Quality, Safety and High Reliability, Huron Consulting Group, Inc.

In this plenary session, board members and executive leaders will learn governance level strategies and practical tactics to directly influence and motivate healthcare organizations to place quality and patient safety as the unequivocal number one objective. Grounded in high-reliability principles and informed by the CMS Patient Safety Structural Measure, this session will highlight what governing board members can and must do to set expectations that sustain organizational focus on safe, high-quality care.

Participants will examine leading board practices for setting clear quality, safety and patient experience goals and incentives to align executive and provider priorities. This session will highlight how boards can dedicate meeting agenda time to meaningful quality and patient safety discussion, how to reinforce the primacy of the organization’s mission and their responsibility to ensure the health system has the resources, infrastructure and leadership capacity required for sustained success. Participants will learn ways to ensure they receive the right data to drive improvement and hear about common challenges boards face when engaging providers in these discussions.

Board members and senior leaders will leave with practical, immediately deployable governance strategies to set direction, motivate leaders and clinicians, and embed quality and patient safety as the organization’s highest priority.

9 – 10 a.m.

AI in Healthcare: From hype to impact – What’s working, what’s not and what leaders need to do next

• Nagesh Badarla, Managing Director, Digital and AI Transformation, Huron Consulting Group

Most artificial intelligence pilots stall before they scale. A Healthcare Financial Management Association study found that only 18% of health systems have mature AI governance and a fully formed strategy in place. The gap isn’t the technology – it’s what surrounds it.

The organizations getting it right aim AI where work is not creating value, freeing people for what matters, and govern it with oversight proportionate to their size and risk.

Whether you steward a critical access hospital or a multi-billion-dollar system, you’ll leave this session with the insight to move AI forward responsibly and effectively. You’ll learn how to:

• separate genuine AI capability from market noise when evaluating a proposal;
• distinguish the deployments that have delivered measurable value from those that have stalled, and recognize the decisions that separate them;
• judge whether their organization’s AI oversight is proportionate to its size and risk; and
• apply questions to govern AI investment decisions at board level.

10 a.m.

Adjourn