West Virginia Medical Institute

WVMI wins second Quantros award

Charleston, WV - The West Virginia Medical Institute (WVMI) received an award at the 2006 Safety Conference and User Group sponsored by the software company Quantros Oct. 2 and 3 in Las Vegas.

The conference, whose theme was “Patient Safety: a Changing Landscape,” brought together health care organizations that use the company’s Occurrence Report Management tool, an Internet-based medical-error reporting system.

WVMI Chief Medical Officer John Brehm, MD, FACP, accepted the Safety Excellence Award in recognition of outstanding commitment to safety and quality and ongoing leadership in driving safety improvement in health care. Last year WVMI earned the Technology Infusion Award for using technology to promote patient safety in the state’s hospitals.

“Quantros has been a key partner in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality project,” said Brehm, referring to a $1.7 million matching patient safety grant WVMI received from the federal agency in 2004. “We appreciate Quantros’ continued support for this valuable program in West Virginia, which is truly unique in that it is voluntary and has been so well accepted by hospitals.”

Brehm praised the efforts of those who have made the project a success, including WVMI Patient Safety Director Patricia Ruddick, RN, MSN, and Principal Investigator Gail Bellamy, PhD. WVMI’s other partners include the West Virginia Hospital Association, the West Virginia Office of Rural Health and Verizon.

WVMI is a nonprofit organization that serves as West Virginia’s federally designated Medicare Quality Improvement Organization. WVMI’s partnership with the California company began in 2001, when WVMI began designing a patient safety project for the state’s hospitals. In 2002, six rural hospitals began using Quantros’ product to provide administrators with “real time” access to error reports, so hospitals could quickly analyze their own data and implement patient safety improvement projects. The project expanded to more than two dozen hospitals after WVMI received the grant.