ONC Prize Winner Debuts at IHI Forum

In November 2018, JMAG won $45,000 in the Department of Health & Human Service’s Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge. One year later, the team debuted a refined, production-ready version of the prize-winning application at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Annual Conference recently held in Orlando – #IHIForum.

Having worked in the IT department at Virtua Health for over 17 years, JMAG's CEO Mary Ang saw the frustrations with EHRs first-hand. Most concerning for her were the patient safety issues that were being caused by EHRs, like alerts not appearing to physicians who are about to prescribe a contraindicated medication. Sometimes these issues were actual product deficiencies and sometimes they were caused by incorrect system configurations.

In either case, Ang saw that these issues were being under reported by staff because there was no easy way for them to notify IT. Instead, it would often be an offhand comment during an IT meeting when end-users would bring up these issues. Ang believed there had to be a better way.

When a colleague told Ang about the Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge, she jumped at the chance to build something that could make it better for end-users. Ang's team at James Madison Advisory Group created QuickCapture, a simple utility that runs in the background of a user’s desktop and through a hotkey (or system tray icon), allow that end-user to quickly and easily capture an EHR issue.

The product debuted to a price of $288 per month.  “I wanted to set a price that was reasonable,” explained Ang. “I don’t believe software should be thousands of dollars a month when it doesn’t need to be. Plus, I wanted to give back to the community. I won the prize money from HHS and used it to create this product. It seemed like the right thing to do to charge only what I needed for it.”

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