athenahealth is now adding patient safety reporting to its EHR workflow. The cloud-based health technology company teamed up with Milpitas, Calif.-based patient safety organization Quantros to make it happen.
As a result, thousands of clinical providers and provider organizations across the country will gain free access to what athenahealth executives describe as "a safe, privileged environment in which they can easily submit patient safety concerns and findings as well as share best practices to enhance safety and improve care."
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athenahealth will implement Quantros' safety reporting solution throughout athenahealth’s national network of ambulatory clinics, serving approximately 47,000 healthcare providers. As part of this partnership, athenahealth's EHR clients will be able to submit patient safety data as part of the EHR workflow to a federally sanctioned patient safety organization, the Quantros Patient Safety Center.
"At athenahealth, we are teachers and learners," athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said in a news release. "We fundamentally believe that highly productive work and ongoing improvement comes from a culture of safety and from within an environment where continuous collaboration and advancement can happen."
"Partnering with Quantros," Bush added, "strengthens our delivery of cutting-edge technology and services and differentiates the environment in which our clients can iterate, collaborate and improve. Safety and innovation in healthcare go hand and hand; this is a natural and exceptional partnership."
Bush noted that the partnership comes before the implementation of federal mandates related to safety reporting, and is aimed at protecting and advancing patient care and the medical practice workflow.
The initiative lines up with calls on patient safety from the Office of the National Coordinator, he added, and it also delivers upon the third pillar of athenahealth's Code of Conduct, published earlier this year, in which the company committed to proactively work with clients to identify, report on, and resolve all patient-safety related events via a PSO.
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"At a time when our healthcare market is moving towards greater transparency and greater accountability, this partnership will set a higher standard for safety and collaboration," Keith Hagen, president and CEO at Quantros, said in a statement. "Credible data is critical to driving improvement. Pair that data with athenahealth's stellar patient care coordination, and we are set to enhance health care performance on a national scale."
