NEWS

VHA Promotes Quantros Patient Safety Tool Through Marketing Agreement

VHA Inc., a nationwide network of more than 2,200 leading community-owned health care organizations and their affiliated physicians, has signed a marketing agreement with Quantros, a leading provider of real-time, Web-based performance improvement solutions for the health care industry, to support its members? goal of improving patient safety. The Quantros ORM (Occurrence Report Management) system helps health care organizations by automating the entire continuum of incident management activities. The agreement also includes Quantros? HR2.1 Staffing Effectiveness Solution and Qxcel Accreditation & Compliance Automation.

"VHA is committed to providing our members with tools needed to support their patient safety, accreditation and compliance initiatives," said Jeff Hayes, VHA senior vice president, business operations. "We have met with good success utilizing Quantros? technology in other areas, specifically VHA?s efforts around helping members address work force issues with VHA?s Work Force Measurement Tool, and we are anxious to build upon that success in other areas."

The Quantros ORM, HR2.1, and Qxcel products are all hosted on the Quantros real-time, Web-based platform and automate resource-intensive manual processes like data collection, statistical analysis, and creation of reports and graphs. Health care organizations using Quantros solutions typically report 40-50 percent gains in efficiency and greatly improved decision-making and benchmarking capacity in these areas.

"Leading health care organizations across the nation tell us that our patient safety, staffing effectiveness, and accreditation and compliance solutions save them resources and help them achieve their performance improvement goals faster," said Rajnish Mishra, M.B.A., Ph.D., president and chief executive officer of Quantros.

The VHA marketing agreement expands the current relationship between VHA and Quantros, signed in February 2003. VHA signed an agreement to make the Quantros platform standard for its clinical affairs projects. The Quantros platform also powers VHA?s Transformation of the ICU, Medication Error Prevention Initiative and Tomorrow?s Work Force.

About Quantros

Founded in 1996, Quantros provides real-time knowledge creation solutions for benchmarking, patient safety, accreditation and compliance, and outcomes monitoring for leading healthcare providers, payers, and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Quantros' web delivered applications provide a standard platform for automating resource intensive manual processes. Through a variety of direct sales and vendor partners, nearly 700 hospitals are licensed to use Quantros? web-based technology solutions.

About VHA

Built on the premise there is strength in numbers, VHA Inc. is a nationwide network of more than 2,200 leading community-owned health care organizations and their affiliated physicians. Based in Irving, Texas, with 18 local offices across the U.S., VHA comprises nearly 25 percent of the nation's community hospitals, including many of the nation?s largest and most respected institutions. VHA offers member organizations access to products and services that will help them improve financial and clinical performance and achieve market success. As a cooperative, VHA distributes income annually to members based on their participation. In January 2003, for the fourth year in a row, VHA was named one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" by Fortune.