Celebrating Innovation: Empowering Our Future Through Everyday Ingenuity
By Rob Ferguson, MD, Peaks Region Chief Medical Officer
In healthcare, we often talk about compassion, dedication, and clinical excellence. Today, I want to honor another essential part of who we are: our ability to innovate.
Every day, you rise to the challenge of delivering outstanding care in an ever-changing healthcare landscape. I want to celebrate your spirit of innovation and encourage you to see yourselves not just as healers, but as pioneers who shape the future of medicine with every patient interaction.
The seeds of innovation begin with you. No matter your role, you carry insights no one else has. You see where patients struggle, where teams feel friction, and where small changes can transform an experience.
Your contribution starts with:
Asking a curious question,
Noticing an improvement that could become a standard,
Seeing a patient’s need before it is spoken,
Or challenging a status quo with compassion, respect, and courage.
At Intermountain Health, we’re proud to invest in clinical innovations that simplify and improve outcomes:
Our adoption of the Nuance Copilot digital scribe allows providers to focus less on paperwork and more on meaningful patient connections.
In Canyons and Desert Region EDs, we’re using the ePneumonia clinical decision support to empower clinicians in diagnosing and treating pneumonia patients. The result: 40% decrease in 30-day mortality and over $3 million per year decrease in financial burden to patients. The St. Mary’s Regional Hospital ED has been piloting ePneumonia, and it will begin rolling out to the entire Peaks Region, starting with Montana, this year.
Our Contact Center AI voice assistant streamlines patient communication, saving time and improving patient satisfaction by reducing call abandonment rates.
St. Vincent Regional Hospital was honored with a 2025 Innovation in Healthcare Award for their groundbreaking Robotics Hub.
The NICU at Saint Joseph Hospital has led the way involving families in patient care and improving testing to address infant swallowing abnormalities and dysfunction.
Just in the realm of diabetes care, we have much to celebrate:
St. James Hospital was the first Intermountain Hospital to connect a child with a cutting-edge treatment for Type I diabetes.
The St. Vincent Diabetes Center is transforming diabetes care through telehealth and technology.
Primary care clinics across our region are implementing a simple process improvement: ordering a urine sample for patients to complete when they check in rather than waiting until after they’ve seen the provider. This simple change in steps improves A1C monitoring by ensuring patients have the time and ability to complete the urine sample and makes the results available for the provider to review during their time with the patient.
Some express uncertainty about leveraging AI in healthcare. We’re seeing patients engage in a patchwork of tools and technology, often driven by influencers and AI platforms. This can create concern that we as clinicians and caregivers are competing with these external factors for our patients’ attention, and our expertise may not be seen for the value it brings. However, by embracing the changes we’re seeing, creatively learning and leveraging these innovations, we can increase the trust the community has in us as physicians, APPs, nurses, and caregivers who show up for them in moments of vulnerability.
Healthcare’s future – our future – will not be secured by vigorously guarding old methods, but by re-imagining our role as healers who adapt to changing needs and changing ways patients engage with their health. Your willingness to re-imagine the future – while staying anchored to our mission – is what will continue to set us apart.
Share Your Simplification and Innovation Ideas
Affiliated medical staff: Email your ideas to your CMO and include the subject line “Continuous Improvement.”
Employed medical staff: Log in to the Continuous Improvement Portal and select "Ideas" from the side menu and click on "Add Idea." Label your ideas with the word "simplification" or "simplify" in the key identifiers section of the idea entry form.
Thank you for your innovation, your compassion, and your unwavering commitment to advancing care.