Innovation Incubators Offer Hospitals Unlimited Possibilities for Quality Improvement

CHICAGO, IL--(Marketwired - August 31, 2015) - Q-Centrix, the leading data abstraction solutions provider in healthcare, today announced the launch of its Innovation Labs, a unique program designed to incubate new ideas and solutions to solve a wide array of quality issues within hospitals.

At a time when hospital resources are at a premium and quality demands are ever increasing, Q-Centrix offered key partner hospitals unlimited access to their configurable technology and specialized workforce of more than 600 nurse-educated quality information specialists at no charge. Then, it posed a simple question: "what would you do to improve quality in your hospital if resources and technology weren't a barrier?"

"Our Innovation Labs are a novel concept we developed to approach solving the challenges faced by today's quality departments," explained Q-Centrix CEO, Milton Silva-Craig. "We're offering unlimited access to our team and technology and saying "the sky's the limit; how can we improve your hospital quality?"

Atlantic General Hospital and Health System and Mississippi Baptist Health Systems are both Q-Centrix Innovation Labs.

"Atlantic General is a small hospital with limited technical resources in a rural location," noted Robert Yocubik, director of quality at Atlantic General Hospital. "Q-Centrix brings a vast talent pool that can offer a variety of data collection capabilities. The idea that we can use this program to target a specific problem and partner with Q-Centrix to find a solution is very appealing to a hospital of our size and type."

Atlantic General, a 62-bed independent hospital located in Berlin, Maryland, is exploring three opportunities with Q-Centrix: quality data integration, readmission reduction and sepsis. The director of quality was eager to participate as an Innovation Labs due to the dual-direction the program encourages.

"A performance improvement initiative our hospital has been working on is the early identification and treatment of sepsis," added Yocubik. "Q-Centrix has the technology to assist in identifying septic patients in the hospital setting which will lead to prudent and timely empiric treatment. This is one target of our participation in Innovations Labs and we are confident it will help us make strides in this area."

Mississippi Baptist has specific challenges it was hoping to address as an Innovation Lab, as well. "Our goal was to identify patients at high risk for inpatient mortality within select populations and to improve best practices in infection control and prevention, and transition of care," commented Karlene Strayer, manager of quality data management at Mississippi Baptist. "We are hoping that Q-Centrix -- through its technology solutions -- will help us identify patients that meet the criteria for advance care settings while they are in the hospital. This will help us get them the quality of care best suited to their needs and target our mortality rate issue at the same time."

Mississippi Baptist, located in Jackson, Mississippi, is licensed for 500+ beds and averages a daily census of 300-350 patients.

"Innovation Labs will enable Q-Centrix to gain a deeper understanding of the needs in the market, rapidly test ideas to address those issues and, ultimately, create more effective solutions for the industry," concluded Brian Foy, Vice President of Product Development at Q-Centrix.

About Q-Centrix

Q-Centrix aims to improve patient care in the U.S. through the use of its market-leading technology platform, Q-Apps, coupled with the industry's largest and broadest team of nurse-educated, quality information specialists. Conducting in excess of one million quality data abstractions annually, Q-Centrix is a comprehensive quality partner to hundreds of hospitals, providing clinical surveillance, abstraction, analysis and improvement solutions.

To learn more about the leader in clinical surveillance and quality data abstraction, visit www.q-centrix.com.

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