ORQA has its own dedicated data center operated solely by ORQA employees on ORQA-owned hardware in Peoria, Illinois.  Backups are kept off-site on additional systems managed by ORQA employees.  As custodians of your sensitive data, ORQA is always 100% certain where your data is and who has access to it.

Most adverse event reporitng solutions, either paper form-based, or electronic, are typically hospital-based.  This siloed approach where the hospital has total control of the data leads physicians to feel if they document any evidence of an error committed by themselves or a colleague, it would not be in the best business interest of their practice, especially without the ability to add context beyond the initial report.

ORQA addresses this concern by managing its own off-site data center and remote backups(no 3rd party), writes its contracts to specifiy that each organization owns their own data 100%.  ORQA will not sell or disclose any data to any 3rd party without written mutual agreement.  ORQA has no strategic or contractual agreement to share data with any 3rd party provider, payer, or accrediting body.

Partner and affilliated organizations may collaboratively share data on a single ORQA instance as the business culture allows, and rights and relationships may be changed at any time to reflect business relationship changes.

Any patient safety or quality improvement data and communications stored with a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) is federally protected from disclosure or legal discovery.  This protection includes, but is not limited to, HIPAA requests, Privacy Act/FOIA requests, state and federal civil discovery, accrediting bodies, and state regulatory agencies.  In most cases, data stored with a PSO may be de-identified (both patient and provider) before submitting to accrediting bodies and state agencies to meet applicable requirements.

Effective November 19, 2008, ORQA, LLC was listed by the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as a PSO. The Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 provides uniform Federal privilege and confidentiality protections for patient safety work product submitted to PSOs.  AHRQ Director Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D. has said this regulation "...provides a framework for Patient Safety Organizations to facilitate a shared-learning approach that supports effective interventions that reduce risk of harm to patients."

Click here for more information on PSO's.

Click here for the AHRQ's official listing of PSO's.