Accelerating Improvements in Patient Safety: Lessons from the 2026 MPSC Annual Conference
- MPSC Team
- Jul 27
- 4 min read
More than 500 clinicians, healthcare leaders, researchers, educators, policymakers, patient and family advocates, technology innovators, and industry partners came together for the 2026 Mid-Atlantic Patient Safety Conference.
The theme—Partnering for Patient Safety Excellence—reflected an increasingly important reality: the most persistent patient safety challenges cannot be solved by individual clinicians, departments, or healthcare organizations acting alone.
Preventable harm is shaped by complex systems. It is influenced by how care is designed, how technology is implemented, how information moves across settings, and whether patients, families, and care teams are meaningfully involved in creating solutions. Progress depends on a broader patient safety ecosystem that can identify shared risks and exchange learning to translate promising ideas into sustained improvement.
Across the inaugural Patient Safety Summit, as well as keynote discussions, breakout sessions, poster presentations, awards, and informal conversations, several important lessons emerged.
Patient safety must become a shared enterprise
Healthcare organizations continue to confront many ongoing risks: diagnostic delays, medication errors, communication breakdowns, technology-related harm, workforce pressures, and fragmented transitions of care.
The conference reinforced the need to connect local improvement work to a larger strategy. That means identifying common risks and spreading innovative approaches to address barriers that no single organization can resolve independently.
Healthcare providers, government agencies, researchers, educators, technology developers, industry partners, and communities all have a role. The opportunity is to move from parallel activity toward coordinated action.
Patients and families must help design safer systems
Patient and family advocates were active participants throughout the conference, bringing perspectives that are too often considered only after a practice, policy, or technology has already been developed or harm has occurred.
Lived experience can reveal risks that may not appear in traditional performance improvement work. Patients and families directly experience where communication fails, where transitions become confusing, and how organizational processes affect trust after harm occurs.
Meaningful engagement means involving patients in the design of the care they receive.
Technology must be treated as part of the safety system
Technology can improve care and help organizations proactively identify risks; however, it can also introduce new hazards when tools are poorly designed or implemented without sufficient testing and integration into clinical workflows.
Conference discussions about artificial intelligence, medical devices, and digital systems made clear that technology should not be viewed as an independent solution. The safety of technology depends on the design of the environment in which it operates.
The most important questions are not simply whether a technology works, but whether it supports the people expected to use it. Does it fit the workflow? Does it create new burdens that incentivize workarounds? Were frontline staff and patients involved in its design? Are outcomes examined across different populations and care settings?
As healthcare accelerates the adoption of artificial intelligence and other emerging tools, patient safety expertise must be proactively applied before safety issues occur.
Sustainable improvement requires changing systems
Many conference presentations and award-winning projects showcased how to embed safety into everyday operations rather than depend on individuals to remember one more step.
Lasting improvement comes from redesigning the conditions in which care is delivered. That may involve changing a technology interface, standardizing a process, clarifying ownership, strengthening communication, or identifying risk before harm occurs.
The poster presentations demonstrated how organizations across the region are approaching these challenges. They highlighted the value of sharing the practical lessons behind their successful outcomes: what barriers emerged, what adaptations were required, and what others should consider before applying a similar approach.
Relationships are part of the safety infrastructure
Some of the conference’s most important exchanges occurred outside formal sessions. Participants networked to identify common challenges, connect with new partners, and reconsider issues through perspectives different from their own.
These conversations are essential in advancing patient safety work. They help create the inter-organizational trust required to discuss emerging risks and failures, ask difficult questions, and seek help without defensiveness.
The diversification of participants to include patient advocates, researchers, policymakers, technology experts, and industry partners demonstrated the value of broadening the patient safety community. Each group brings knowledge and experiences the others do not have.
Progress depends on building momentum
Closing keynote speaker Greg Satell challenged attendees to consider how meaningful transformation spreads. Lasting change grows through networks of people who share a purpose and create momentum across organizational boundaries.
Patient safety has no shortage of dedicated professionals or promising initiatives. The challenge is connecting those efforts across organizations, so they become more than isolated examples of excellence.
Organizational leaders across healthcare and their partners must identify where alignment is possible, create opportunities for shared action, and help others adapt successful approaches to their own settings.
The work continues
The conference demonstrated what partnership for patient safety can look like: patients and families shaping priorities, organizations sharing practical learning, technology experts working alongside clinicians, industry partners contributing to safety discussions, and leaders addressing challenges that extend beyond their own institutions.
The next step is to carry that mindset into the decisions made every day.
Where can organizations share learning rather than recreate it? Which risks require action across organizations or sectors? Whose perspective is still missing? What must be redesigned so that safe care is supported by the system rather than dependent on extraordinary individual effort?
The 2026 MPSC Annual Conference did not offer a single solution to preventable harm. It offered a clearer picture of how meaningful progress will be made: in partnership.
Interested in Learning More?
Ideas Worth Sharing: Top-Rated Patient Safety Posters
Join us on August 20 from 12-1 PM, as we spotlight three attendee-selected poster presentations from the conference. Each team will have 15 minutes to share the key insights, lessons learned, and practical takeaways from their work, followed by time for discussion and questions. Register here.
March 17-18, 2026 | Baltimore, Maryland
Early bird registration opens in the fall.
