CHA Recognizes Stamford Health With the 2025 John D. Thompson Award for Excellence in the Delivery of Healthcare Through the Use of Data
WALLINGFORD — The Connecticut Hospital Association (CHA) awarded Stamford Health the 2025 John D. Thompson Award for Excellence in the Delivery of Healthcare Through the Use of Data for its Comprehensive Preoperative Optimization Program (POP). Stamford Health was presented with the prestigious award at the 2025 CHA Annual Meeting, held on Tuesday, June 17, 2025, at the Bristol Event Center in Bristol, Connecticut.
Stamford Health has optimized the safety of inpatient surgical procedures by implementing the Comprehensive Preoperative Optimization Program. Since its inception in 2017, the program has decreased overall postoperative morbidity by 73% and postoperative mortality by 57%. Same-day surgical cancellation rates were frequently above 10% in 2017 and are now less than 1%.
“It is an honor to present Stamford Health with this award for an initiative that demonstrates how clinical teams transform data into real-world improvements in patient care,” Jennifer Jackson, CEO, CHA. “The success of POP is a testament to Stamford Health’s commitment to collaboration and innovation. This teamwork has resulted in a thoroughly coordinated program that draws expertise from numerous hospital departments to create a seamless experience for all patients undergoing inpatient surgery. We applaud the team for this exceptional achievement.”
As of 2017, Stamford Health had continued to observe high surgery cancellation rates and some potentially avoidable postoperative adverse events. To optimize surgical quality and safety, an interdisciplinary clinical and administrative team convened to develop POP. Key goals were to standardize and improve the surgical preoperative risk assessment process and to perform a multidisciplinary risk assessment prior to all inpatient surgical cases. In addition to assessing surgical cancellation rates, Stamford Health sought to evaluate POP’s clinical effectiveness through participation in the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP).
Stamford Health developed a POP policy to summarize key processes and to educate pertinent clinical staff, created information system screens to promote standardized POP risk assessments, and built a dedicated outpatient POP clinic inside the Tully Health Center, which serves all patients having inpatient surgery. Prior to surgery, patients are seen by their primary care physician and a hospitalist physician, who conducts standardized risk assessments to screen for cardiac, pulmonary, infection prevention, pain management, and other potential clinical risks.
POP evaluations could result in a surgery proceeding as originally planned, being delayed for further medical optimization, or canceled if excessive operative risk was identified. For patients for whom surgery was delayed for medical optimization, clinical status was optimized through additional diagnostic testing, POP visits, and/or further subspecialty evaluation. Following POP’s conception in 2017, the program was gradually adopted across all surgical services at Stamford Health.
From 2017 to 2023, American College of Surgeons NSQIP data were monitored to assess the impact of POP on a number of clinical endpoints. Rates of specific surgical complications decreased by as much as 70%. These included cardiac events, surgical site infections, and transitional care parameters such as readmission.
CHA’s John D. Thompson Award was established in 1994 and honors the contributions made by John D. Thompson to healthcare administration and patient care quality during his career. Dr. Thompson was a professor at Yale’s Schools of Nursing, Medicine, and Public Health, known for his advocacy of using quantitative data in health policy formulation, and specifically his role in the development of DRGs for hospital reimbursement. The award recognizes excellence in patient care through the use of data, as demonstrated by the improvement of internal operations, procedures, and outcomes.
Learn more about the program by watching the award recognition video here.
