Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What is the Advocate Health Sharing Day event and Touchstone Awards program?
A. Advocate Health Sharing Day is an annual virtual event hosted October 22, 2025, recognizing individual and group efforts exhibiting exceptional performance in the areas of safety, health outcomes and experience. An integral part of the event is the Touchstone Awards program, honoring projects for their demonstration of evidence-based practices and achievements.
Q. What kind of projects are submitted for a Touchstone Award application?
A. Projects must demonstrate the use of an improvement process along with quantifiable results, with focus on innovation and knowledge spreading. These projects can range from widespread, multi-site improvements to very local, unit-specific improvements, spotlighting exceptional efforts to improve care delivery in the following areas:
Safety: Process improvements such as high reliability, reduction of harmful events, Hospital-Acquired Conditions (HACs), infection prevention, medication reconciliation, teammate safety, etc.
Health Outcomes: Successful, evidence-based practices that positively impact health outcomes such as mortality rates, core measures, readmissions, diabetes, etc.
Experience: Significant achievements related to patient satisfaction scores, medical staff satisfaction scores, teammate engagement scores, etc.
Q. Where can I submit a Touchstone Award application?
A. Touchstone Award applications must be submitted online by June 30 at 11:59 p.m. EST. There will be no exceptions to the deadline.
Q. What resources or support will be available to teams working on their Touchstone Award applications?
A. Reach out to Experience, Quality or Safety teammates within your organization for assistance when writing your Touchstone Award application.
Q. Are there specific criteria or guidelines for selecting the Touchstone Award honorees?
A. The Touchstone Award application outlines points available for each section of the submission. The quality and comprehensive coverage of each section is reviewed and scored by three judges. Projects selected as Touchstone Award winners, and thus featured during Sharing Day, are the overall highest scoring projects.
Q. Can you share examples of Touchstone applications from previous winners?
A. The following are examples from previous Gold level winners:
Optimizing Primary Care Wellness Visits
Q. How many Touchstone Award winners will be selected? Are there different categories?
A. There will be multiple honorees per category depending on the number of qualified applications. In 2024 there were 60 projects awarded: 10 gold; 20 silver; 30 bronze.
Q. Are sites or locations limited in the number of submissions?
A. Sites and locations can submit as many applications as they would like.
Q. When will Touchstone Award honorees be selected?
A. Honorees will be selected and notified at the beginning of August.
Q. What if my submission wins a Touchstone Award but I am unable to attend the Sharing Day virtual event?
A. If you are unable to attend you can designate someone to present on your behalf.
Q. Who is invited to attend the event? Is there a fee to attend?
A. All teammates across the enterprise are invited to attend the virtual event, including frontline staff, physicians and APPs, leadership and corporate areas. There is no fee to attend.
Q. Who will present during the event?
A. Touchstone Award honorees are asked to present their projects throughout the day.
Gold Touchstone honorees will share a presentation highlighting their project evidence-based practices and successful results.
Silver Touchstone honorees will present a poster highlighting their projects during a virtual poster session.
Bronze Touchstone honorees will provide a prerecorded video summarizing their project which will be available on the event platform.
Q. Will there be a keynote speaker?
A. Yes. We will host a keynote speaker during the midday portion of the event.
For more information, contact Jennifer.Shore@atriumhealth.org.