WVMI Recognized for Patient Safety Efforts
Charleston, WV - Charleston WVMI received an award at the 2005 Patient Safety Conference and Users’ Group sponsored by the software company Quantros Sept. 15-16 in St. Louis.
WVMI was one of seven recipients honored at the conference, which brought together health care organizations that use the company’s Occurrence Report Management tool, an Internet-based medical-error reporting system.
WVMI’s Patient Safety Director Patricia Ruddick, RN, MSN, accepted the Quantros Technology Infusion Award for using technology to promote patient safety in rural West Virginia hospitals, an effort in keeping with the conference theme, “Safety and Risk: from Data to Action.”
“Quantros has been a key partner in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality project,” said Ruddick, referring to a $1.7 million matching patient safety grant WVMI received from the agency in October in partnership with the software company and others. “We appreciate Quantros’ guidance in implementing the online incident reporting system in 27 West Virginia hospitals. And the conference was a great opportunity to see how other institutions are using their data to improve patient safety.”
Others honored at the conference were Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., Inova Loudoun Hospital in Leesburg, Va., Evanston Northwestern Healthcare in Chicago, the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y., Jacksonville Shands Medical Center in Jacksonville, Fla., and the New England Medical Center in Boston.
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 and the West Virginia Hospital Association received the federal grant, along with partners Quantros, Verizon and the West Virginia Office of Rural Health. In June, AHRQ recognized the project as among the top four in the nation at its Annual Patient Safety and Health Information Technology Conference.