Submit your Quality & Safety Poster Today

Deadline September 12

20th Annual

Top Poster Sessions: October 20-24, 2025

The Quality and Safety Symposium’s Poster Session will showcase the hundreds of quality improvement projects across UChicago Medicine. The posters will be hosted on an interactive cloud-based platform. This format allows poster viewing and provides people with the opportunity to offer feedback directly to poster authors.

Posters will be available to view over several weeks. Each day during National Healthcare Quality Week, the top three posters in each STEEP principle will be shared in a live lunchtime zoom event.

Poster submitters will identify which STEEP principle the poster highlights and if the poster incorporates an intervention to address health equity and equitable care. Equity is a fundamental cross-cutting component of all quality.

Posters in early stages or works in progress are permissible submissions.

Poster Templates: 2 Column Template (PPT), 3 Column Template (PPT)

Poster Submission Deadline: September 12, 2025

The Principles

STEEP

Safety

Safety must be a property of the system. No one should ever be harmed by health care

Timeliness

Unintended waiting that doesn’t provide information or time to heal is a system defect. Prompt attention benefits both the patient and the caregiver.

Effectiveness

Health care It should match science, with neither underuse nor overuse of the best available techniques

Efficiency

Constantly seeking to reduce the waste – and hence the cost – of supplies, equipment, space, capital, ideas, time, and opportunities

Patient Centeredness

The individual patient’s culture, social context, and specific needs deserve respect, and the patient should play an active role in making decisions about her own care
Ensuring Optimal Outcomes

Equitable Care

Health Equity is when everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. This requires improving access to the conditions and resources that strongly influence health. Health equity requires a focused commitment to eliminating disparities in healthcare, education, safe housing, and freedom from discrimination.2

Equitable Care is care that does not vary in quality because of someone’s race, age, gender, ethnicity, income, geographic location, or any other demographic detail. However, it may vary in practice, because quality care – the right thing at the right time-is sometimes different for different people. Equitable care does not mean treating every patient the same. Instead, equitable care ensures optimal outcomes for all patients regardless of their background or circumstances. And sometimes this requires different care.

Our FY23 Annual Operating Plan under the Quality & Safety Pillar calls for us to: “Empower staff and providers to use available data to improve equitable outcomes for the communities we serve across the care continuum”.

As a result, we aim to reduce health and healthcare disparities, advance health equity and improve the quality of care for all. This requires identifying disparities in process measures and outcomes AND taking responsibility to reduce and eliminate them. Sources

Awards

Poster Winners

  • Top Poster in Equity: Addressing Hypertension Disparities Utilizing Community Health Workers and Clinical Pharmacy in Home Visits
  • Top Adult Poster (Tie): Observations From a Pilot Volunteer Program to Prevent Delirium & Improving Patient Throughput by Streamlining Admissions Processes
  • Top Pediatric Care Poster: Implementation of neonatal point-of-care ultrasound for umbilical catheter placement and positioning
  • Top Poster Overall: Blood Culture Bottle Shortage: An Informatics Intervention

2023 Winners

  • Top Poster in Equity: Partnering on Patient Safety: Improving Engagement with Event Report Reviews
  • Top Adult Poster: Lab Stewardship BPA: An Informatics Approach to Reduce Inpatient Lab Orders
  • Top Pediatric Poster: Vancomycin Area under the Curve and Trough Correlation in Pediatric Oncology Patients
  • Top Poster Overall: Evaluating the Clinical Effect of a Discharge Pharmacy in the Adult Emergency Department on Return Emergency Visits and Readmissions

2022 Winners

  • Top Poster in Equity: Chronic Pain, Opioid Use and Opioid Use Disorder Management in Older Adults (I-COPE): Pragmatic Trial Development and Preliminary Results
  • Top Adult Poster: Managing Hypertension through Remote Patient Monitoring
  • Top Pediatric Poster: Simulation Training to Improve Pediatric Residents’ Recognition and Management of Acute Stroke
  • Top Poster Overall: An Emergency Department “Surge” Program

2021 Winners

  • Top Poster in Equity: Identifying Racial Inequities in Hypertension Control
  • Top Adult Poster: Automated Diagnosis (AutoDx): An Innovative Approach to Clinical Documentation Improvement
  • Top Pediatric Poster: Streamlining Pediatric Antibiotic Approvals to Improve Efficiency and Fellow
  • Top Poster Overall: CAUTI Reduction: An Interprofessional Project

  • Impact on an Oncology Clinical Pharmacist Specialist in an Outpatient Multiple Myeloma Clinic
  • Highly Reliable Fall Prevention: Engaging Frontline Staff
  • Reduction in Age-Related Disparities in Depression Screening Before and After Implementation of a Medical Assistant Screening Protocol

  • A Multi-Disciplinary Hip Fracture Program for UChicago Medicine
  • Choosing Wisely Order S.M.A.R.T.T. Labs: Sleep: Making Appropriate Reductions in Testing & Timing
  • UCARS Patient Transportation: University of Chicago Access Ride Service
  • Improving Capacity and Patient Throughput

  • The Gravity of Granularity: An ED Throughput Experiment
  • Videotaping Traumas – Reducing Variation in IV Fluid Administration
  • Medication Order-entry Modifications Significantly Reduce Anti-retroviral Medications Errors

  • Epic Antimicrobial Stewardship Module Significantly Increases Safety Related Interventions
  • Transport of Critically Ill Patients
  • Reducing the Risk of Clostridium difficile Infection: Rethinking C.diff Testing at UCM

  • Prevention of Elective Deliveries Less Than 39 Weeks and 0 Days Gestational Age
  • Improving Patient Satisfaction Results- The Radiology Journey
  • Scrub the Hub- Decreasing Central Line-Associated Bloodstream Infections (CLABSI) in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU)
  • Acute Cord Compression- Most Efficient Approach to Diagnosis
  • Successful Central Line Associated Bloodstream Infection (CLABSI) Reduction Using a Multi-Disciplinary Approach
  • Reduction of Voice Recognition Errors in Radiological Dictation- Effects of Systematic Individual Feedback
  • Obstetrical Hemorrhage Management

  • Antimicrobial Stewardship Initiatives to Optimize Vancomycin Dosing and Reduce Nephrotoxicity
  • Applying ACLS and Pregnancy Modifications to Maternal Cardiac Arrest A Team-based Approach
  • Ask Me to Explain Campaign: Improving Communication to Increase Patient Satisfaction in the Pediatric Emergency Department
  • Colorectal Bundle: A Multi-disciplinary Teamwork Approach to Reduce Surgical Site Infections
  • Identification of Clinical Factors for Performing Voriconazole (VRC) Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) at an Academic Medical Center
  • Improving the Care Pathway for Total Joint Patients
  • Pediatric Sepsis Initiative in the Emergency Room
  • Protecting Patients from Self Harm: Implementation of An Evidence-Based Suicide Screening Process
  • Teaching Patient-Centered Use of the Electronic Medical Record to Millennial Learners

Using Smart Forms to Discretely Capture Stroke Data for Electronic Reporting