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 

Over the past few months I've really been impressed with the information filtering out about Google Wave.  It seems to combine the best features of web email such as gmail, with Twitter, Facebook, and Sharepoint, all in one bundle.  The best part is their announcement that not only will Google Wave be Open Source, but we won't have to rely on the Google "cloud" because they say they're releasing Wave server  software as open source to run private servers.

 Our ultimate goal is to tightly couple the compliance and formal tracking and communications features of Active Agenda  with the rich collaborative features of Wave to bring a comprehensive solution to healthcare to successfully manage the exponentially growing amount of compliance and safety requirements.

 Google Wave is still in its very early stages, but we're actively working on what we can, and one of the first steps is the availability of Google Gadgets based on the OpenSocial API that give realtime visibility in to key metrics tracked within our Active Agenda servers.

Feel free to click the link below to add the Gadget to your own iGoogle start page, or any other page that supports Google Gadgets.

If you add the Gadget and click the links, you'll be taken to our demo site login screen.  If the username and ID don't prepopulate, you can log in with username: 'demodr' and password: 'orqapass'.

We're eager for feedback for further enhancing the visibility and collaborative features of our applications, so please click the Login link to register on our web site and participate in the Community Forums to share your feedback.  Also feel free to call 888-408-8886 or email us at info@orqa.org anytime.