NEWS

West Virginia Medical Institute Receives National Recognition for Safety Project Using Quantros's Safety and Risk Management Solution

The West Virginia Medical Institute (WVMI), a Quantros client and partner, has received national recognition from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) at its 2005 Annual Patient Safety and Health Information Technology Conference. WVMI was recognized for its ongoing work to improve patient safety in rural West Virginia. The WVMI project "Partnering to Improve Patient Safety in Rural West Virginia" was one of four project honorees from over 100 grant-funded projects through the AHRQ. WVMI utilizes Quantros application software for safety and risk Management in support of this project for all incident and near-miss data capture, reporting and analysis across the 25 participating West Virginia rural healthcare facilities.

Under the grant, WVMI provides rural hospitals with access to Web-based software and technology to record medical errors and "near misses" (errors that could have happened but were averted), and provide a shared learning support infrastructure. For their efforts, hospitals receive educational opportunities, reports of system-wide "near misses" and opportunities to share lessons learned and improvements that lead to better, safer health care.

WVMI participated in a high-visibility keynote plenary panel entitled "Innovations in Patient Safety and Health Information." Principal Investigator Gail Bellamy, Ph.D., spoke to congressmen, private-sector leaders and officials of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The panel was moderated by AHRQ Director for Health Information Technology Dr. Scott Young.

AHRQ Director Dr. Carolyn Clancy, who attended the panel session, said earlier that the agency was pleased to support the exciting work being carried out in West Virginia. "This project is an example of how immediate improvements can be made that have benefits for both patients and providers, while showing other states how it's done, especially states serving rural populations."

"The benefits of this project are many," said Dr. John Brehm, Chief Medical Officer of WVMI. "The easy-to-use web-based event self-reporting, data management, and work-flow technology platform provided by Quantros allows us and the participating hospitals to produce reports that are used to detect specific patterns and trends in patient safety issues. Early detection and recognition of specific safety issues or concerns allows for proactive remediation and institution of interventions to avert costly outcomes. The underlying data infrastructure also allows participants to anonymously compare their performance with other hospitals participating in the project. The clinical depth of the Quantros solution coupled with its internet-based architecture and scalability is vital to the ongoing success of this project."

"Recognition of the WVMI project's success is yet another example of Quantros technology empowering healthcare organizations with real-time actionable data and information to appropriately address patient safety and risk management concerns," noted Sanjaya Kumar, MD, President and CMO of Quantros. "For local reporting of events, investigation, follow-up, data-driven interventions, and use of the resulting data to satisfy state, national, and regulatory reporting initiatives, the Quantros Safety and Risk Management solution continues to gain national adoption by healthcare organizations and large integrated healthcare delivery network systems (IDN). Currently, over 200 healthcare organizations and IDNs are using this platform to positively impact national patient safety issues, better manage their risk and focus their performance improvement efforts with measurable ROI data. This is a tremendous honor for WVMI and we are honored to play a part in its success."

About Quantros

Founded in 1996, Quantros serves the healthcare industry with innovative, clinically-based technology solutions and services in the areas of safety and risk management, quality and performance improvement, and accreditation and compliance. Quantros solutions are completely web-based and provide real-time actionable knowledge for quality improvement, indicator monitoring, reporting, and comparative and benchmarking analysis. Quantros products and services are currently used by over 950 healthcare facilities throughout the United States. Quantros is headquartered in Silicon Valley and maintains sales and service personnel throughout the United States. For more information on Quantros, please visit the corporate Website at www.quantros.com

About WVMI

WVMI is a health-care contractor for the federal and state governments. WVMI has subsidiaries in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Virginia and employs or contracts with more than 400 people. The organization's customers include the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Defense and state Medicaid agencies, among others.