ORQA blog

For the past two years ORQA has been listed as a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).  It has been an amazing experience to be involved with such a passionate and visionary group of people.  However, ORQA has requested to be removed from the list.

 The primary driver to request delisting is our current customers have declined to enter in to a PSO contract for various reasons.  Since we primarily market to physician groups, I've found that many do not want to lose the option to take punitive action for errors documented in our software, which of course is prohibited under a PSO contract.  In addition, ORQA's core competency is to provide the software and technical services to implement and manage a Patient Safety Evaluation System (PSES), and we feel it's in our best interest to focus on that core competency and partner with our customers, other licensed providers, and patient safety subject matter experts, letting them take the lead on managing the operation of a PSO. 

We will continue ongoing development of freely available PSES software, including support for Common Formats adverse event reporting as well as the WHO surgical checklist.

We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the PSO model as well as our Open Source software, so please leave a comment.  For more information on PSOs, the AMA has published this very well thought out pamphlet:  http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/370/patient-safety-organizations.pdf

 Thanks,

 Mike 

Dr. Atul Gawande does a great job explaining why checklists are now necessary in US healthcare in his best-selling new novel, The Checklist Manifesto.  

We've implemented the WHO surgical checklist as a module which integrates with other modules in our PSES to allow the clinician to feel safe the checklist data is stored securely and is accessible for later follow-up if needed.  They can also trigger other actions when necessary such as a patient safety event report form (Common Formats 1.0), a workorder request for faulty equipment, document participants, assign tasks for later follow up, and quantify cultural challenges or successes through Active Agenda's unique culture measurement solution.

See how simple it is to complete a demonstration WHO surgical checklist by clicking here.  After clicking "Save", check out the various tabs to spawn associated records or click the "Reports" tab to export a completed pdf form version of the WHO checklist form. 

The application theme can be customized to your organization's preference, the checklist is also easily customized (by a system administrator),  and best of all Active Agenda and all of ORQA's healthcare extensions are freely available as open source software under the Reciprocal Public License.

Download Patient Safety Modules for Active Agenda here.

The downloaded module needs to be added to an Active Agenda instance avialable through http://www.activeagenda.com or by downloading ORQA's VMware appliance available for free download for registered users.

Thanks,

Mike