Stroke Quality Improvement Awards 2025

2025 Award Categories

Awards are given to hospital stroke programs in Minnesota that implemented the best quality improvement initiatives in the following categories:

• Continuous Impact: This is an award for starting an initiative that created a meaningful and long-term improvement in quality of stroke care.
• Operational Excellence: This is an award for initiative that focused on collaboration between different programs to improve quality of stroke care.
• Outstanding Achievement: This is an award for initiative that led to evidence-based positive change in quality of stroke care.

• Community Champion: This is an award for an initiative that focused on filling a community need related to quality stroke care.

  Meet this year's six winners:

  2025 Continuous Impact Award Recipients

  Essentia Health-Virginia
  Acute Stroke Ready Hospital

  Virginia, Minnesota

  

  Quality Improvement Project Details

  • Opportunity for Improvement: Decrease door to imaging times by offering community stroke awareness education and encourage calling EMS when stroke symptoms appear.
  • Action Plan: Outreach to local partners and attend various community events to provide stroke education. Host an in-person and virtual stroke awareness walk to be accessible for everyone in their rural community to participate.
  • Results: Number of patients arriving by EMS increased, number of patients arriving by walk in decreased, and minutes in between door to imaging decreased.

  Award Qualifications

  Essentia Health-Virginia received this award for their accomplishments in:

  • Engaging hospital leadership and community network to create lasting relationships and reach desired audience.
  • Adapting event to be accessible for those in their rural community by offering a virtual and in-person option.

  Winona Health 
  Acute Stroke Ready Hospital

  Winona, Minnesota

  Quality Improvement Project Details

  • Opportunity for Improvement: Standardize workflows to improve door to treatment goal times.
  • Action Plan: Collaborate closely with telestroke partners to identify process inconsistencies, solve equipment issues, and change protocols to ensure quick delivery of quality stroke care.
  • Results: Improvements seen in multiple time sensitive measures, such as median door to treatment times were cut in half.

  Award Qualifications

  Winona Health received this award for their accomplishments in:

  • Forming strong partnerships internally and externally to make lasting process change in stroke care provided.
  • Deep commitment to performance improvement through detailed standard work and rearranging exam rooms to optimize patient care.

  2025 Operational Excellence Award Recipients

  Sanford Wheaton Medical Center
  Acute Stroke Ready Hospital

  Wheaton, Minnesota

   

  Quality Improvement Project Details

  • Opportunity for Improvement: Decrease the time it takes for imaging to be read by provider.
  • Action Plan: Collaborate with radiology, emergency department, and emergency medical services staff to send stable patients straight to imaging instead of rooming then collecting vitals and performing labs.
  • Results: Patients are now meeting and exceeding goal times for receiving imaging and imaging read.

  Award Qualifications

  Sanford Wheaton Medical Center received this award for their accomplishments in:

  • Successfully implementing a large process change internally and with their local emergency medical services.
  • Staff dedication to tracking and maintaining progress made by quality improvement initiative.

  Essentia Health St. Mary's - Detroit Lakes
  Acute Stroke Ready Hospital

  Detroit Lakes, Minnesota

  

  Quality Improvement Project Details

  • Opportunity for Improvement: Improve the telestroke workflow to increase the use of telestroke to care for stroke patients and timely administration of treatment.
  • Action Plan: Work with staff, telestroke provider, and supporting stroke coordinators to eliminate issues with the equipment to enable quick treatment.
  • Results: Telestroke utilization more than tripled. Patients seen through telestroke and were eligible for treatment received within 60 minutes of arrival.

  Award Qualifications

  Essentia Health - St. Mary's received this award for their accomplishments in:

  • Optimizing technology to provide timely access to stroke experts and treatment for their rural patients.
  • Partnership and participation between health system stroke care of all designations to ensure success.

  M Health Fairview Ridges
  Acute Stroke Ready Hospital

  Burnsville, Minnesota

  Quality Improvement Project Details

  • Opportunity for Improvement: Decrease the median time between patient arrival, being imaged, and ultimately receiving treatment.
  • Action Plan: Track, adjust, and standardize the patient care pathway to be sent straight to imaging from the ambulance.
  • Results: Median time between patient arriving by EMS and receiving imaging decreased by 16 minutes and as a result, led to timely treatment within the goal times.

  Award Qualifications

  M Health Fairview Ridges received this award for their accomplishments in:

  • Comprehensive use of quality improvement tools and methodologies for initiative.
  • Impressive use of data to operationalize change, gaining buy-in from all staff involved and ensuring no disparities in care.

  2025 Outstanding Achievement Award Recipients

  Mayo Clinic - Mankato and Rochester
  Primary Stroke Center and Comprehensive Stroke Center

  Mankato and Rochester, Minnesota

  Quality Improvement Project Details

  • Opportunity for Improvement: Use the latest research and clinical practice guidelines to implement modified monitoring for eligible stroke patients who received treatment.
  • Action Plan: Pilot safely lowering the number of assessments for eligible patients after receiving treatment at two stroke hospitals within the health system.
  • Results: Initial data collected proved very positive including no complications, decreased lengths of stay in intensive care unit, and good staff satisfaction.

  Award Qualifications

  Mayo Clinic - Mankato and Rochester received this award for their accomplishments in:

  • Exploring and testing new ways improve care for stroke patients through research and best clinical practice guidelines.
  • Positive impacts experienced by both patients and hospital resource management.

  Hennepin Healthcare
  Comprehensive Stroke Center

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  

  Quality Improvement Project Details

  • Opportunity for Improvement: Improve the time it takes from patient arrival to receive a specialized catheter-based stroke intervention.
  • Action Plan: Investigate all steps in between patient arrival and receiving the procedure. Provide timely feedback on indicators not meeting target times to help meet goal. Use simulation exercises to collect more data on improvement.
  • Results: Patients experienced faster door to catheter-based stroke intervention, decreased length of stay, and improved morbidity and in-hospital mortality.

  Award Qualifications

  Hennepin Healthcare received this award for their accomplishments in:

  • Initiative required extensive buy-in, collaboration, and coordination among multidisciplinary teams to improve door to puncture times.
  • Strong use of data collection and analysis throughout the process, including assessing if patients are getting equitable care.

  CentraCare Monticello
  Acute Stroke Ready Hospital

  Monticello, Minnesota

  Quality Improvement Project Details

  • Opportunity for Improvement: Decrease patient arrival to treatment times to less than 60 minutes.
  • Action Plan: Increase communication between departments involved in stroke care, streamline processes, and optimize electronic health record system to help reach goal.
  • Results: Improvements have been seen across many stroke time sensitive care indicators, including in stroke team activations and telestroke connection time.

  Award Qualifications

  CentraCare Monticello received this award for their accomplishments in:

  • Leveraging new technological tools for telestroke and secure chat to improve communication across the care team involved.
  • Involving stakeholders to demonstrate and note barriers in workflow to better understand issues and inform improvement.

  2025 Community Champion Award Recipients

  Sanford Bemidji Medical Center 
  Acute Stroke Ready Hospital

  Bemidji, Minnesota

  

  

  Quality Improvement Project Details

  • Opportunity for Improvement: Reduce burden and improve healthcare access to post-stroke care for admitted rural stroke patients.
  • Action Plan: Using telemedicine, work with providers at Comprehensive Stroke Center to provide access specialized care not available in the Bemidji area to rural stroke patients.
  • Results: Initial feedback is positive and post-stroke telehealth utilization is higher than target.

  Award Qualifications

  Sanford Bemidji Medical Center received this award for their accomplishments in:

  • Seeking out creative solutions to improve post-stroke care for their rural population with limited access to specialty care.
  • A strong commitment to community served both in hospital and after the stroke event.

  Grand Itasca Clinic and Hospital 
  Acute Stroke Ready Hospital

  Grand Rapids, Minnesota

  

  Quality Improvement Project Details

  • Opportunity for Improvement: Safely admit and keep stroke patients who received treatment close to their home community instead of transferring to another hospital.
  • Action Plan: Identify monitoring needs after treatment administered and address any staff education gaps.
  • Results: Nursing has had very strong compliance with required assessments and monitoring for patients who received treatment. Safely admitted three patients and kept them closer to home.

  Award Qualifications

  Grand Itasca Clinic and Hospital received this award for their accomplishments in:

  • Dedication to adhering to safe practices and clinical guidelines while also working to keep patients in their community.
  • Finding ways to improve the stroke care experience for those living in rural areas where resources may be less available.

  Essentia Health 
  12 hospitals, including a Comprehensive Stroke Center, a Thrombectomy-Capable Stroke Center, a Primary Stroke Center and 9 Acute Stroke Ready Hospitals

  Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin

  

  Quality Improvement Project Details

  • Opportunity for Improvement: Standardize practices across the entire health system to deliver consistent, evidence-based care cross all levels of stroke services to create a unified stroke system network.
  • Action Plan: Collaborate among all stroke sites and interdisciplinary team members to consolidate resources across the system and reduce individual stroke problem workloads, especially at the smaller, rural sites.
  • Results: Created standardized tools that aligned with current clinical guidelines and evidence-based practices. Reduced the number of policies and order sets and found improved documentation in the electronic health records.

  Award Qualifications

  Essentia Health received this award for their accomplishments in:

  • Large undertaking with big benefits for the community and staff to provide consistent care and decrease unnecessary workload.
  • Ensuring their rural patients and staff had more resources available to provide the best care no matter where they were located or how small the hospital was.