Leading Quality and Equity in Healthcare

Eileen Jaskuta is the Vice President for Quality and Patient Safety at Main Line Health. With more than 25 years of healthcare experience, she excels in quality improvement, patient safety, leadership, regulatory compliance, and process redesign. She holds a Master of Science in Health Administration and a Six Sigma certificate. Eileen is recognized for developing collaborative teams and leading change to improve outcomes and healthcare delivery.

Career Path and Leadership

My professional journey began as a bedside nurse specializing in critical care. Over the years, I became increasingly interested in quality improvement, both through hands-on experience and graduate coursework. This interest led me to management roles, first as a nurse manager and then as a director. Eventually, I moved into positions focused on quality, including Director of Quality and Chief Quality Officer at various facilities. Today, I serve as Vice President for Quality and Patient Safety at Main Line Health. My career has blended clinical practice, leadership, and a dedication to continuous improvement.

My approach to leadership has been shaped by numerous mentors who invested in my growth and encouraged me to pursue opportunities. Key experiences include earning a Black Belt in Six Sigma from Penn State, which refined my understanding of process improvement, becoming a Baldridge Fellow and deepening my appreciation of excellence in organizational structure, process and outcomes. Serving as a surveyor for a national regulatory body provided valuable insight into best practices and the importance of learning from peer organizations. Regular networking and knowledge exchange have allowed me to adopt and adapt strategies that drive quality improvement.

Approaching Health Equity

In healthcare, no two days are alike, but the common thread is the focus on promoting safety and process improvement across the organization. My schedule involves meetings with different teams, reading reports, staying updated on regulatory changes like CMS rules, and monitoring emerging trends in healthcare literature. I devote significant attention to evaluating safety events, guiding strategies to improve patient outcomes, and ensuring that caregivers have the resources needed to deliver the safest, most effective care. My commitment stems from personal experiences; witnessing close relatives encounter safety events deeply motivates me to safeguard patient trust and advocate for safe, reliable care.

Advancing health equity is essential to upholding high standards of care. At Main Line Health, we base our quality dashboards on the STEEEP framework from the Institute of Medicine, which emphasizes safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and patientcentered care. For many years, we have proactively stratified outcomes data by race, age, ethnicity, and geography to identify and address disparities. The organization’s longstanding Disparities in Care Colloquium fosters ongoing projects aimed at improving access for patients to preventive screenings like colorectal cancer screenings and reducing disparities in care, such as cardiac care for women. Effective equity work requires a commitment to analyzing outcomes across all demographic groups and closing performance gaps so that care benefits everyone.

Innovations Beyond Hospital Walls

Ensuring consistent quality and safety across different care settings presents practical challenges. Our strategy is to focus on identifying areas for improvement. For example, data revealed gaps in screening rates among specific patient groups. In response, we launched targeted initiatives that involve community health workers who address social factors like transportation and caregiver support. Sending FIT test kits to patients has allowed us to reach more people, especially those for whom a colonoscopy may not be immediately necessary. Workforce shortages in certain specialties remain an ongoing challenge, and collaboration between quality improvement teams and equity teams ensures we leverage all available resources. Community health workers play a vital role in connecting patients to appropriate services and reducing barriers to care.

Care is evolving rapidly outside traditional settings. Our team is already examining practices beyond the hospital, such as coordinating follow-up care to prevent readmissions. Community health workers have become instrumental in these efforts, extending support after discharge to help patients maintain their health and avoid hospital returns. We see the expansion of care coordination, digital tools, and AI as critical to reshaping patient safety and quality over the next decade. These approaches ensure that care and oversight continue, improving outcomes when patients transition back to their everyday environments.

Essential Traits for Future Leaders

Success in leading quality and patient safety across a health system requires agility and openness to new ideas. Embracing innovation, especially the potential of artificial intelligence, is important; AI can help reduce diagnostic errors and enable quicker, more comprehensive data analysis for decision-making. Leaders must be comfortable interpreting data, adapting to change, and anticipating future developments in healthcare technology and practice. The evolution of hospital equipment brings both improvements and new safety considerations, underscoring the need for structured review and risk management. Safeguarding patient information and avoiding embedded biases in AI systems are also critical priorities. In this fast-changing landscape, it’s important to stay curious and unafraid of exploring new possibilities.