Celebrating excellence in healthcare

2026 Award winners

At the 2026 Connected Healthcare Summit in Nashville, more than 400 healthcare leaders gathered to confront one of the industry’s most persistent challenges: closing the gap between safety data and real-world action.

RLDatix recognized eight organizations and individuals across seven award categories – each one raising the standard of care in ways that are both measurable and meaningful.

Innovation in Patient Safety & Risk Management

Winner: Children’s Hospital of Orange County, part of Rady Children’s Health – Orange, California

CHOC completed a full migration from its legacy event reporting system to RLDatix’s healthcare risk management and patient safety platform in just four months. The team redesigned workflows, eliminated bottlenecks in how events were referred to unit leaders and simplified submission forms to reduce friction for frontline staff. The results: average event closure times dropped from roughly 60 days to 30 days, and reporting volume increased – both within the same four-month window.

✅ Why it matters
When events close faster, clinical teams can act sooner to prevent recurrence. When more staff report without hesitation, it signals trust in the system – the foundation every safety culture is built on.

Innovation in Regulatory & Compliance

Winner: University Hospitals – Cleveland, Ohio

University Hospitals connected system policies, regulatory standard, accreditation audits and clinical reference content into a single, accessible environment where caregivers can find what they need at the point of care. They streamlined the user experience through unified search and single sign-on, and stood up a dedicated subcommittee to govern the use of PolicyGen AI – backed by a research study evaluating user perceptions of accuracy, safety and usability.

✅ Why it matters
Every minute a clinician spends navigating disconnected systems is a minute not spent with patients. By making compliance intuitive rather than burdensome, University Hospitals reduces friction for caregivers while strengthening readiness for accreditation surveys.

Innovation in Patient Experience & Outcomes

Winner: GI North – Cumming, Georgia

Using SocialClimb (an RLDatix company), this gastroenterology practice systematically gathers patient feedback and translates it into operational improvements. The team also tracks how those efforts translate into real outcomes – measuring whether outreach and engagement activities are leading to more patients getting the care they need.

✅ Why it matters
In specialty care, where patients often choose providers based on reputation and referrals, the connection between patient experience and organizational sustainability is direct. GI North shows what it looks like when patient feedback drives real decisions – not just reporting.

Data Continuity & Availability

Winner: Medstar Health – Columbia, Maryland

Medstar Health prioritized governed, clinician – friendly access to historical data, ensuring information is available when and where it’s needed for clinical decision-making. Through its partnership with RLDatix, Medstar has advanced the use of analytics and AI to strengthen patient safety event analysis while modernizing its data foundation.

✅ Why it matters
Effective digital transformation starts with making the data you already have work harder for the people who need it most. When clinicians can access historical safety data at the point of care, they make better-informed decisions, faster.

Innovation in Provider & Workforce

Winner: Saint Francis Health System – Tulsa, Oklahoma

An RLDatix customer for more than a decade, Saint Francis recently expanded its use of credentialing to include residents and additional contract groups, and adopted Provider Insights to build unified provider profiles that connect workforce data with safety solutions.

✅ Why it matters
When credentialing, safety events and provider performance data are connected, organizations can spot patterns that siloed systems would miss – like whether onboarding gaps correlate with incident trends. That’s kind of proactive risk management that protects both patients and providers.

Excellence in Implementation

Winner: SCA Health – Deerfield, Illinois

Since first partnering with RLDatix in 2016, SCA Health has built a safety platform deeply embedded in the daily workflows of its outpatient surgery center network. The team has expanded proactive risk assessments for high-impact areas like wrong-surgery prevention and retained surgical items, redesigned near-miss reporting to align with high-reliability principles and integrated safety data with enterprise systems. The model SCA Health built was subsequently adopted across their broader parent organization.

✅ Why it matters
Sustained optimization – continuously evolving the platform alongside the organization – is what turns a reporting tool into an enterprise safety intelligence system. The fact that their parent organization adopted the same model speaks to its scalability and impact.

Change Agents of the Year

Winners: Stephanie Grabowsky and Becky Pomrenke – University of South Alabama Health, Mobile, Alabama

Stephanie Grabowsky led one of the most complex RLD360 implementations among the year’s nominees, breaking a sweeping initiative into achievable steps and shaping the platform to fit real clinical and operational workflows. Beck Pomrenke has been the driving force behind rebuilding USA Health’s patient safety program, including bringing in the nationally recognized CANDOR framework in preparation for new federal patient safety reporting requirements. Becky was named to Becker’s 2025 list of 132 patient safety experts to know.

✅ Why it matters
Technology alone doesn’t transform an organization – people do. Stephanie and Becky demonstrate that when deep technical expertise is paired with a genuine commitment to safety culture, the result isn’t just a successful go-live, it’s lasting, systemwide change.

Collaboration Champion

Winner: Katelyn Hobbs – Midwest Surgical Hospital – Omaha, Nebraska

During Midwest Surgical Hospital’s PolicyStat implementation, Katelyn didn’t just transform her own organization’s policy governance structure; she actively helped peer organizations in the RLDatix implementation cohort refine their workflows and strengthen adoption. She openly shares lessons learned, practical strategies and her emerging “DO-MORE-ology” improvement framework, encouraging others to adapt and build on it.

✅ Why it matters
Healthcare improvement accelerates when organizations learn from each other – but that kind of open knowledge-sharing doesn’t happen on its own. Katelyn’s generosity created a multiplier effect, helping multiple organizations move faster and avoid missteps.