Burlington, Vt. – Eight hospitals have been awarded the 2025 Vermont Oxford Network Award for Excellence in Quality Improvement. The selective award recognizes hospitals that demonstrate dedication to multidisciplinary, structured quality improvement in the care of infants and families.

Multidisciplinary care teams studied quality improvement fundamentals and applied those methods to advance projects within the VON quality improvement collaborative All Care is Brain Care.

“Congratulations to the recipients of the 2025 Vermont Oxford Network Award for Excellence in Quality Improvement,” said Dr. Jeffrey Horbar, Vermont Oxford Network President and CEO. “By applying quality improvement in partnership with families and hospital leadership, these teams have not only demonstrated QI processes in their own unit, but have also shown how other members of the collaborative can use quality improvement science to improve the health and wellbeing of infants and families.”

In addition to submitting a presentation about their work, teams were required to include a family partner on the quality improvement team, meet with senior leadership about the improvement project, and demonstrate quality improvement performance through identifying a SMART aim, applying formal QI methods, and measuring results.

The eight teams receiving the 2025 VON Award for Excellence in Quality Improvement are:

• Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas, honored for their work to implement a care bundle to optimize neurodevelopment in infants with BPD.
• Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich., honored for their work to involve parents in mitigating painful and stressful procedures for infants.
• Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., honored for their work to reduce unnecessary labs and painful procedures by decreasing the number of glucose and blood gases for premature infants.
• Manning Family Children’s Hospital in New Orleans, La., honored for their work to optimize neurodevelopment in infants with BPD by reducing sleep disruption.
• Norton Children’s Hospital in Louisville, Ky., honored for their work to decrease the time before a parent’s first hold of their very low birth weight infant.
• Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, N.C., honored for their work to decrease rates of chronic lung disease in Very Low Birth Weight infants.
• Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, Ind., honored for their work to reduce the incidence of severe IVH in infants born <27 weeks gestation.
• St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., honored for their work to increase skin-to-skin care for infants born <30 weeks gestational age.

The teams advanced their quality improvement projects by adhering to the VON core values of measuring for data-driven decisions, implementing evidence into practice, partnering with families, promoting health equity, and collaborating with others. In the All Care is Brain Care quality improvement collaborative, the teams used VON’s dynamic web-based resources to identify evidence-based potentially better practices to support their quality improvement processes. VON refers to improvement ideas as “potentially better practices” rather than “better” or “best” practices to indicate that each practice must be adapted, tested, and shown to work in the local context. The teams tested the improvement ideas in their units with the guidance of VON faculty and other quality improvement educational resources and custom measurement tools.

The awarded hospitals will share their stories of improvement on the VON website and with other teams who are part of the worldwide improvement community as work that shows dedication to the principles of quality improvement in the care of infants and families.

Contact:
Drew Arnold
VON Marketing & Communications Manager
darnold@vtoxford.org  |  802.488.8025 ext. 225

January 14, 2025