Accelerating Clinical and Translational Science The Stanford Medicine Clinical and Translational Science Award Program enhances the efficiency and impact of translating laboratory, clinic, and community observations into health interventions. Recently renewed for seven years, the NIH-funded program emphasizes the urgent need for equitable access to treatments across diverse populations, including minorities, women, and individuals with rare diseases. A significant focus is placed on using large datasets, real-world data, and advanced AI and machine learning models to improve clinical strategies. The program supports more than 1,500 clinical and translational trials, development of training programs for junior investigators, and a commitment to ethical and rigorous research practices.

An Automated Solution for Improving Clinical Trial Data Handling Phase 1 clinical trials require meticulous data collection and high-quality electronic data capture (EDC) for compliance with good clinical practice and FDA standards. Traditional data entry from electronic medical records like Epic to the EDC is labor-intensive, often straining resources and delaying new trials. A team at the Center for Cancer Cell Therapy developed an automated Epic-to-EDC data solution using computer programming languages, meaning it has a lower barrier to entry than an AI-driven solution. The hybrid process automates data entry for high-volume areas while retaining some manual input, ensuring consistency and accuracy in clinical data. By December 2024, it will have been deployed successfully for four investigator-initiated clinical trials. Recognized nationally, this innovative approach delivers significant time savings and establishes Stanford as a leader in data management automation in clinical trials, enhancing staff capacity and minimizing burnout.

A Helping Hand for NICU Families To address the challenges faced by families of high-risk infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, an educational program was designed and implemented using the electronic health record patient portal. This initiative aimed to improve the discharge preparation process, enhance parent satisfaction, and optimize nursing efficiency. The program provided tailored, early, and user-friendly education – guiding families through the journey home. Family satisfaction regarding discharge preparation, based on Press-Ganey surveys, jumped from 47% to 70%. Access to educational materials improved to 95%, and after implementation, nursing time saved increased to an average of 23.8 hours per month, highlighting the efficiency and effectiveness of the program. Importantly, three years after implementation, family use is sustained with 81% of assigned education pages being read.

Hospital-Within-a-Hospital Model Shines Facing exponential growth in demand that saw inpatient capacity exceed available beds on a nearly weekly basis, Stanford Health Care negotiated a complex strategic arrangement with Sequoia Hospital to create a "hospital-within-a-hospital" model. This project was highly complex, requiring careful planning, decisive action, and close collaboration between SHC and Sequoia Hospital. The team navigated challenges with strong relationship management, innovative problem-solving, and a commitment to excellence.In the first 90 days, the unit admitted 400 patients with an average occupancy of 64% and a 20% reduction in emergency department boarding times. In addition, the unit accommodated 42 same day patient transports for procedures or imaging. There were no patient safety events. The pioneering model proved effective in alleviating overcrowding at the Palo Alto campus, generated glowing patient feedback, and paved the way for future collaborations.

Shaping Tomorrow’s Physicians: Integrating AI into the Nexus of Medical Education In a rapidly evolving landscape, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medical education has become pivotal to prepare students and trainees for the future of health care, and Stanford Medicine is at the forefront of this innovation. This strategic initiative brought together education leaders, data scientists, and curriculum development experts to introduce and integrate learning materials, including objectives, assessments, educational tools, and an evaluation of content with the goal of introducing AI in Medicine content by the academic year 2025-26. This initiative aligns with Stanford School of Medicine's mission to innovate in health care education and improve human health through discovery and care.

Increasing Access to Cancer Clinical Trials Despite the importance of novel therapies in clinical trials for patients with advanced and metastatic cancers, a meager number of patients participate in such trials. Combining the resources of the Cancer Phase 1 and Tumor Genomics programs, the Early Drug Development Program developed a patient focused screening process to increase patient access and overcome restrictive eligibility criteria, competitive enrollment slots, and patient-specific barriers. In just a few years, the program has become one of the highest enrollers to trials in the Cancer Center, increasing total visits by more than 200% and new patient visits by nearly 150%.

Ensuring Safe Enteral Feeding in ICU When intensive-care patients are fed by tube, ensuring the proper nutrition is critically important — especially for formulas higher in fiber or fat — and mistakes can lead to serious complications and even death. This team has identified a simple but effective solution that seamlessly integrates high-risk feeding guidelines into the day-to-day workflow. The fix, which also added feeding information to the Medication Administration Record, created a warning within the EHR when the wrong tube-feeding formula would be administered. Over three months, it helped avert 42 incorrect orders.

Improving EHR Usability in Pediatric Setting The difficulty of leveraging the full potential of EHR systems is greatly complicated for pediatric patients and their families. The Pediatric Data Sharing Collaborative – a multidisciplinary group of clinicians, analysts, and information systems managers – has become a national leader in solving these knotty ethical and technical problems to enable effective information sharing across the pediatric and young adult age continuum. The solutions include developing a novel AI processor to flag confidential information that may be inappropriately shared with parents, improving usability for families whose primary language is Spanish, and creating processes to better handle the nuanced privacy and care issues of the pediatric setting. Many of these innovations have been adopted by Epic and other institutions nationwide.

Propelling Stanford Medicine Behind the Scenes Across an astounding array of projects — from infection outbreak reporting to payroll processing — the TDS Enterprise Integration Team is the behind-the-scenes engine that doesn’t just ensure Stanford Medicine runs smoothly but also rises to meet new challenges. In just the past year, the team provided 24/7 support for the infrastructure that handles more than 18 million messages daily over 2,000 interfaces, facilitated the CURES integration, and backed the BeakerAP project to bring pathology data online at SHC and Stanford Children’s. The team also facilitated MatchSource, making Stanford Medicine the first medical center globally to go live with Epic’s clinical data integration to initiate the search of matching non-family donors with recipients.

Improving Communication in the Operating Room The operating room is one place where everyone should know your name. That deceptively simple idea led to a wonderful project that saw nearly 1,000 perioperative team members — physicians, nurses, technologists, and other staff — receive scrub cabs embroidered with their preferred name and their role. The results were stark: Incidents of mistaken roles plummeted and the use of preferred names soared. In a space where communications errors can negatively impact patients, the labeled scrub caps reduced confusion, improved teamwork, and affirmed Stanford’s respect for individuals.

Diversifying the Medical Workforce The Stanford Clinical Opportunity for Residency Experience (SCORE) program is a prime example of Stanford Medicine’s mission to diversify the medical workforce finding real-world application — to spectacular effect. The program brings fourth-year medical students from diverse backgrounds to Stanford for four-week residential clinical training programs at both Stanford Health Care and Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, making it a truly enterprise-wide collaboration. Of the more than 400 SCORE alumni since 2016, 57 matched at Stanford for residency, making it one of our most effective recruiting programs.

Commission on Justice & Equity Charged with the critical mission of strengthening Stanford Medicine’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices, better understanding our organizational culture, and addressing health equity, the Commission on Justice and Equity delivered emphatically. The Commission – with its membership comprising representatives from across our community and external DEI experts – engaged Stanford Medicine students, faculty, staff, and clinicians to identify opportunities for fostering greater inclusion and belonging on campus and becoming a national leader in addressing health disparities. Stanford Medicine leadership has actively implemented the Commission report’s insightful recommendations, including appointing an enterprise-wide Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer.

RECOVER Team RECOVER combines Stanford Medicine’s unique strengths in translational and cross-disciplinary science while realizing our mission of using new knowledge to benefit humanity. This collaboration between multiple departments and groups stands as a national model in the study of Long COVID. Of the 15 sites in the country focused on studying this disease, RECOVER has one of the largest and fastest-growing number of human participants, and its initial contract resulted in four additional basic science awards. The rapid success has resulted in the study expanding to Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley, which will only further efforts to more precisely predict which patients will develop Long COVID in the future.

Patient Experience Measurement Modernization After three decades of using insufficient third-party vendors, the Office of Patient Experience pioneered a method for quickly and reliably measuring how patients perceive their care. This effort replaced outdated, resource-intensive patient experience measurement tools with a model that provided real-time data within hours of patient encounters, doubled the rate of patient satisfaction survey responses in six months, decreased IT workload through automation, and created dashboards for reporting data across the organization. Overall, the modernization of patient experience measurement enables Stanford Health Care to create a more patient-centric care environment.

National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN) Core Team Working across seven specialties, our National Clinical Trials Network Core Team developed a multifaceted strategy to break down siloes and establish synergies with specialty clinical research groups. These unique initiatives have simultaneously improved patient relationships, increased enrollment in clinical trials, and created smoother transitions for patients transitioning into long-term follow-up care – creating greater trust with patients and providing them access to novel treatments. Notably, the team’s innovative workflows have strengthened communications among staff and resulted in smoother transitions for patients, their families, and health care providers.

Transplantation Tolerance through Hematopoietic Chimerism Drs. Alice Bertaina and David Lewis developed a groundbreaking method for performing pediatric kidney transplants without immune-suppressing drugs. They discovered that transplanting the donor’s immune system to the patient before surgery removes the possibility that the recipient will experience immune rejection, eliminates the side effects of a lifetime of immune-suppressing medications, and enables transplantation between a donor and recipient whose immune systems are genetically half-matched, such as a child and parent. This uniquely Stanford approach to patient care will have profound benefits at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health and beyond as the protocol received FDA approval in May 2022.

Research Participation Application The team created the Participant Engagement Platform (PEP), to improve our research infrastructure and processes at Stanford Medicine. Their efforts have enabled outreach to thousands more study participants, which has transformed how we engage participants and created tremendous value across our many research programs. This initiative was funded by the Stanford CTSA Award Number UL1TR003142 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), a component of the National Institutes of Health.

SHC, SCH, SHC-VC Infection Prevention & Control The Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) Departments for Stanford Health Care, Stanford Children’s Health, and Stanford Health Care – Valley Care initiated the “Joint IPC Huddle” at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which streamlined pandemic response work between the SHC, SCH and SHC–VC IPC programs. Their leadership created policies and program alignment and demonstrated unprecedented collaboration that will will last long after the pandemic is contained.

Stanford Children’s Health Clinical Research Support Office The Stanford Children’s Health Clinical Research Support Office established an inaugural SCH Clinical Research IS Governance committee with membership from Hospital Privacy, SCH IS, TDS to adjudicate research IS initiatives that necessitated alignment across SCH, SHC, and SoM. The work of the Clinical Research Support Office has continued to advance the clinical and translational research infrastructure and has created sustainable processes and models for enabling research recruitment and providing Epic access for researchers.

Stanford Health Care Enterprise Transfer Center The Stanford Health Care Enterprise Transfer Center team redesigned the enterprise transfer center, leading to a significant decrease in denials of ICU patient transfers due to capacity constraints by more than 10% since the opening of 500P. They met the FY2021 operational plan goals by increasing target population transfers by 5% from FY2020, and identified the workflow for outside referring physicians and internal on-call physicians.

The Stanford Our Voice (OV) Research Initiative: Citizen Science for Health Equity Over the past decade, Our Voice (OV) has engaged diverse groups of citizen scientists across the Bay Area, US, and in underserved communities around the world to successfully catalyze change in local policies and build social environments to support healthy living. Their work has empowered individuals with the right tools to make their local communities healthier.

Stanford Medicine Vaccine Governance Committee The Stanford Medicine Vaccine Governance Committee provided oversight on the longer-term vaccine strategy to ensure equitable distribution among Stanford Medicine, Stanford University, patients, and the broader community. The leadership demonstrated by this governance group created remarkably high level of vaccine confidence in the Stanford Medicine community, enabling Stanford Medicine to administer more than 500,000 COVID-19 vaccines. The committee’s work is a testament to Stanford Medicine’s personal commitment to protecting the health of our patients, community, and colleagues.

Clinical Effectiveness Target Based Care Core Team This team created a method to promote a shared mental model of hospital goals by presenting “achievable benchmarks” from prior like-encounters at the point of care for all stakeholders, including the family. By developing tools that facilitate continuous learning and improvement while preserving safety and patient experience, the Clinical Effectiveness Target Based Care Core team has demonstrated innovative thinking that will streamline and enhance care

Clinical Virology Team By designing and validating an in-house diagnostic test for the novel coronavirus, the Clinical Virology team helped limit the spread of the virus. This effort borne of innovative thinking and strategic collaborations exemplifies how our community’s work has an impact on health locally and globally.

Emergency Department Teams The Emergency Department’s response before and during the COVID-19 pandemic embodies Stanford Medicine’s commitment to high-tech, high-touch care. This model of care puts patients at the center of their care journey, improves outcomes, and creates better experiences for patients and their families.

Kidney Transplant Team The Kidney Transplant (KT) team, under Dr. Busque and Dr. Scandling's leadership, has worked collaboratively and diligently to achieve and deliver excellence in patient care. By continuously identifying opportunities to improve patient care, the Kidney Transplant team has established itself as one of the highest-performing teams in the United States based on several metrics.

MyHealth – Hospital View Team The MyHealth – Hospital View team created a view in which patients can view members of the care team, test results, medications/side effects, progress against goals including pain and mobility & information to prepare for discharge. This provides a personalized care experience that enables patients and their families to focus on health, healing, and recovery.

Network Access Optimization Team The Network Access Optimization team optimized how patients schedule primary care appointments at all Faculty and UHA primary care clinics by creating a common work queue driven by patient preferences, increasing scheduling visibility across system, and enabling self-scheduling and positive user experience.

Stanford Cancer Center’s Tobacco Treatment Service Team The Tobacco Treatment Service team’s ability to bridge the School of Medicine’s expertise in tobacco cessation research with Stanford Health Care’s patient care environment has streamlined critical patient care. The team developed an “opt-out” approach to remove referral requirements, allowing providers to focus on immediate patient needs while ensuring access to evidence-based treatment. Cessation support options for patients include: same-day delivery of cessation medications through a partner pharmacy and counseling.

SURF (System Utilization Research for Stanford Medicine) Team SURF uses advanced technology derived from data science and machine learning to make a concrete difference in how Stanford cares for patients. Their use of data science and machine learning to reduce CLABSI infections, optimize patient flow, predict clinical events, and enhance patient care in myriad other ways exemplifies the profound impact Stanford Medicine has through cross-functional collaboration and innovative thinking.

UHA/SHC Dermatology Team Employing technology, innovation and teamwork, this team has created new and convenient access points to specialty services. By expanding dermatology service options to patients at several UHA locations while pivoting to telehealth, the UHA/SHC Dermatology team exemplifies how a digitally driven approach can streamline and expand access to high-quality care.

Nursing Quality Team The Nursing Quality team’s dedication has ensured that Stanford Medicine provides consistent, evidence-based, patient-centered nursing care. Their work has been critical to Stanford Medicine’s mission and has saved and improved countless lives.

Green Button Team By developing a technology that amplifies the clinical impact of our world-class faculty and creates outcome-driven recommendations at the point care, the Green Button team exemplifies the transformative power of collaboration at Stanford Medicine.

The Stanford Virtual Heart Team The Stanford Virtual Heart team exemplifies the transformative power of collaboration and Stanford Medicine’s global vision. The technology will have a profound impact on the future of education and patient care far beyond Stanford Medicine.

Tim Keyes Through Tim’s development and teaching of the first-year LGBTQ pre-clinical curriculum, service as co-chair of the Minority Medical Alliance, and efforts to develop the LGBTQ+ Forum, Tim has proven to be an exceptional leader and advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. Tim’s efforts have made Stanford Medicine more diverse and more inclusive and will have a lasting and profound effect on or community.