Outlook 2025: Meredith Borak, St. Mary’s Healthcare
This article was originally published by the Daily Gazette, written by Ashley Onyon February 19, 2025.
There are always new opportunities and room for improvement in health care, according to Meredith Borak, executive director of quality and performance excellence and chief nursing executive at St. Mary’s Healthcare.
“Quality improvement is continuous quality improvement,” Borak said. “And even the ‘A’ hospitals have an opportunity for improvement, because health care is ever-changing. Rules and
regulations are ever-changing, and so we have to always be up to date and always looking at every process in the organization to see where we could do better.”
The vision of St. Mary’s President and CEO Jeff Methven to put the health care organization on the map as a premiere hospital providing compassionate, quality care in a community setting attracted Borak to the role roughly eight months ago, she said.
To her, joining the team felt like coming home, even though it’s hundreds of miles from where shegrew up on the south side of Chicago and where she spent much of her health care career
working in Illinois. She first moved to the region for an opportunity at Saratoga Hospital in 2021.
“I just absolutely love it here. It’s been an amazing experience with a great group of people,”Borak said of St. Mary’s. “Everybody here truly cares about this community, because it’s where they get care, it’s where their families get care, it’s where their neighbors get care. And so it’s special to them, and they’re 100% invested in making sure that that care is of high quality and safe.”
Infection prevention, risk management, patient safety accreditation, quality performance and managing complaints fall under the scope of Borak’s department. St. Mary’s has already “tweaked” a number of processes across various departments since she joined the organization.
“I know it sounds cheesy, but every day I feel successful here because every single day I come to work the engagement around quality improvement and creating a culture of safety is so evident, and the willingness to always want to collaborate with me and my department just is just such an amazing feeling,” Borak said.
In the fall St. Mary’s increased its Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) compliance with regulations for managing and treating sepsis to 100% in a single month. Compliance had been at roughly 50% in some previous months. The improvement followed the creation of a “more robust” process to review such cases and determine whether patients met treatment requirements. Borak said staff engagement is a “testament to patient outcomes.”
A new infection preventionist’s initial focuses have included hand hygiene, which is the leading way to stop the spread of infection, Borak said.
Enhancing communication between providers across disciplines to inform care plans is also an ongoing priority to strengthen patient experiences.
Inpatient falls are a current focus. Borak said monthly discussions at quality meetings have resulted in the introduction of a new way to identify patients at risk of falls through signage
outside of rooms. The measure ensures that staff can quickly assess at-risk patients while moving through hallways where situational awareness is vital. It’s a change from common practices of posting alerts in patient rooms or on their doors.
Improvement efforts extend beyond just clinical departments. Facilities management teams are closely monitoring open work orders to ensure they are addressed in a timely manner to prevent related delays to the delivery of care. Food services and nutrition audits of the delivery of trays from the kitchen to rooms within the 10-minute goal also support the patient experience.
“Quality performance excellence can impact every part of this organization,” Borak said. “The way that I look at quality differently than other hospitals is that they’re very focused on just the clinical piece of quality. Here at St. Mary’s our quality committee that meets monthly actually has representation from every discipline in this organization, because each one of us actually plays a part in the qualitative care that we’re delivering.”
Amid those initiatives Borak said that, moving forward, participation by St. Mary’s in the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and Safety Grade is a “big priority.” The organization will receive its first grade this spring through the voluntary program, which is used to inform and empower patients selecting care.
“We want our patients to know that when they come here it’s going to be safe care,” Borak said. “This is just a really great program that shows a hospital’s investment in providing safe care. It really looks at not only those clinical outcomes related to patient safety but it also looks at system structures that that organization has invested in to ensure that they’re delivering safe patient care.”
Although she is passionate about her profession and concentration, Borak said health care wasn’t her first career choice. She initially studied mortuary science, but about a year in found it wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life and instead joined the U.S. Army. She served as a medic on active duty for roughly five years in health clinics, ambulance support battalions and field hospitals in South Korea, Egypt, Louisiana and Alaska.
During that time Borak met her husband, who suggested she study nursing when she got out of the military based on the care she provided to patients.
“I went into nursing school and I never looked back,” Borak said. “It was the best decision I ever made.”
As her career progressed, Borak had an opportunity at an academic medical center in Illinois to work with a physician researching resuscitation performance to improve the delivery of care to
patients requiring such interventions. Her role was to transition the research to clinical practice.
That experience inspired her to move from her front-line role in nursing into quality and performance. She obtained a variety of certifications related to the discipline and a doctorate of
nursing with a focus on outcomes performance management from Loyola University Chicago.
“I think a light bulb went off,” Borak said. “If I could do this with resuscitation, what else could I do it with? And so that’s really what sparked my interest in moving to the quality department so that I could work on quality improvement initiatives more globally throughout an organization.”
Continuing education is important to Borak in staying current with evidence-based practices and supporting her expertise. She’s now pursuing a fellowship in the American College of Healthcare
Executives.
Although she misses being at the bedside as a nurse, Borak said she still interacts with patients regularly while walking through units and discussing workflows and opportunities with health
care providers. She even goes into patients’ rooms to answer call lights when she sees them, rather than sending other staff.
“There’s nothing better than having that special relationship with your patients and providing that one-on-one care, and having those conversations,” Borak said. “I never let go of that, and while I’m not in scrubs and I’m not taking patient-care assignments every day, the way that I could do this job well is that I never lost touch, or I never lost sight of that. And I’m out there in the trenches almost every day.”