2025 Clinical Quality and Safety Trends Report

Healthcare organizations have largely completed the first phase of digital transformation of getting core clinical workflows into the electronic environment. Now, the industry faces a more complex challenge: ensuring those tools work together as an integrated safety system. The shift from the Digitization Era to the Clinical Intelligence Era means success is no longer measured by EHR adoption, but by how seamlessly data, devices, analytics, and governance align to prevent harm and guide clinicians toward safer decisions in real time.

The 2025 Digital Health Most Wired (DHMW) Clinical Quality & Safety assessment captures this evolution, revealing an average maturity score of 8.2 across surveyed organizations and a growing execution gap between those who have deployed digital tools and those who have truly operationalized them. This year’s analysis examines how healthcare is moving beyond digitization to build clinical intelligence infrastructure capable of proactive, continuous patient safety.

The Most Wired Clinical Quality & Safety Trends Report, sponsored by Epic, highlights findings from this segment of the survey and offers providers actionable insights to advance their digital maturity.

Among the findings in the report are:

• Governance is the architecture of clinical quality — Organizations with formal, multidisciplinary clinical governance structures consistently outperform peers on workflow adoption, safety bundle adherence, and alert optimization. The critical differentiator at the highest maturity levels is a formalized partnership between the CMIO and CNIO, where digital decisions are treated as clinical interventions rather than purely technical changes.
• Core digitization is nearly universal — but integration depth is not — Technologies like CPOE and barcode medication administration have achieved near-universal adoption, with 95% BCMA deployment across surveyed organizations. Yet leading systems distinguish themselves not by having these tools, but by ensuring they function as a cohesive clinical safety net rather than a collection of siloed capabilities.
• Medication safety requires closing the last mile — Scanning compliance rates alone do not equal medication safety. High-performing organizations are shifting to exception-based analytics that identify the root causes of scanning overrides — from unreadable labels and wireless connectivity gaps to pharmacy synchronization delays — and address those barriers directly.
• Device integration remains a significant size-based divide — A 23-percentage-point gap in automated device-to-EHR integration exists between large health systems and small hospitals. Eliminating this “transcription tax” is essential not only for reducing clinician burden, but for building the reliable data streams that AI-driven predictive models require to function effectively.
• Predictive analytics are becoming standard practice — and introducing new governance demands — Sepsis detection, deterioration monitoring, and readmission risk tools are now widely deployed, with 78% adoption of predictive surveillance tools. However, rapid expansion introduces the risk of model drift, making formal model governance protocols a critical and emerging priority for leading organizations.

Register and Download the Most Wired Clinical Quality & Safety Trends Report today to dive deeper into these findings and gain access to insights and recommendations that can help drive your organization’s maturity journey.

Check out the 2025 Digital Health Most Wired National Trends Report to see an overview of findings from all segments, including cybersecurity, interoperability, infrastructure, and analytics.