2004 NOV 12 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Quantros, Inc., and the West Virginia Medical Institute (WVMI) have been selected as recipients of a "Transforming Healthcare Quality Through Information Technology- Implementation Grant" from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
Quantros and WVMI applied for the grant in partnership with the West Virginia Hospital Association, the West Virginia State Office of Rural Health, and Verizon.
The grant was awarded to implement electronic event reporting in 24 or more rural hospitals, including at least six critical access hospitals (CAHs). This grant effectively expands on a 2-year pilot project between the West Virginia Medical Institute (WVMI) and Quantros.
According to Quantros CEO and President, Sanjaya Kumar. MD, "Receiving such an important grant from AHRQ not only allows WVMI and it's affiliates to expand their important quality and patient safety work, it is validation that the Quantros solution is viable in terms of functionality in a real-world situation," he said. "WVMI has really lived up to its mission of squarely addressing quality and patient safety issues and as such they and their patients have been rewarded by an equally visionary agency," he continued.
The 2-year pilot program between Quantros and WVMI took shape after the U.S. Institute of Medicine issued its landmark report, To Err is Human, which found in two separate studies that 3-4% of hospital patients suffered an adverse event due to a medical error, and that 9-14% of these adverse events lead to death.
In both studies, over half of the adverse events resulted from errors that could have been prevented. This prompted WVMI to convene a meeting of West Virginia Hospital leaders to propose that they systematically collect, analyze and provide feedback of medical error and event data from West Virginia hospitals.
The pilot program, using Quantros Safety & Risk Solution, would make available to rural West Virginia hospitals this Internet-based medical error reporting system and provide administrators of each individual rural hospital access to error reports in "real time;" so that each hospital could aggregate its own data to implement patient safety improvement projects. The long-term strategy was to encourage all hospitals in West Virginia to use event reporting information to discover and mitigate conditions that might result in patient injury by providing a robust working model.
Over the 2 years, the pilot program substantially met it goals. Of the initial six rural hospitals that participated in this voluntary, confidential medical error reporting system, administrators from those institutions reported an increase in the number of errors being reported and employees felt that their input had been important. One hospital reported a 75% increase in the number of reports over an 8-month period. Participating hospitals reported numerous improvements in care processes resulting from systematic application of event data that reach 5,200 individual cases.
"We are pleased that AHRQ recognized what we've been able to accomplish thus far and is supporting its expansion with this very important grant," John Brehm, MD, WVMI's chief medical officer, said. "This project can bring about real improvements in the care provided to our state's rural population."
Dr. Sanjaya Kumar, chief medical officer at Quantros, suggested, "This is also important on the commercial side as well. The funding will allow us to refine our product by giving us the resources to further drive R&D by having the Quantros Risk & Safety Solution used more widely in hospitals," he said. "For Quantros, this is a strong statement to the healthcare community that we are clearly leading the way nationally in this area and willing to invest in pilots like these to establish quality and patient safety industry leadership," he continued.
Quantros, Inc., offers Web-based healthcare quality and data management applications. The West Virginia Medical Institute (WVMI) is a not for profit physician-sponsored organization that works nationally to improve health care.
The AHRQ is a branch of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. As a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it is the lead federal agency on quality research.
This article was prepared by Drug Week editors from staff and other reports. Copyright 2004, Drug Week via NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net.
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