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