RESTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Octo Consulting Group (Octo), an award-winning provider of technology and digital services to the federal government, today announced that it has been awarded a five year $10 million blanket purchase agreement (BPA) by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to maintain and enhance its Quality and Safety Review System (QSRS).
AHRQ is the lead Federal agency charged with improving the safety and quality of America’s health care system by developing the knowledge, tools, and data needed to help health care professionals, policy makers and patients make informed health decisions. As the digital world rapidly transforms the health care landscape, QSRS was created to provide national data on patient safety and adverse events, using a software tool designed to be used by local hospitals and health systems to identify and measure adverse events in support of patient safety improvements.
AHRQ is currently piloting QSRS with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Clinical Data Abstraction Center, Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, MedStar Health’s National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare to assess the accuracy, efficiency, and usability of QSRS. AHRQ looks to enhance functionality while maintaining QSRS during pilot testing. As such, they have turned to Octo to apply its expertise in agile development and cloud solutions to maintain and enhance QSRS.
“Across the entire health care ecosystem, agencies, organizations, and patients are all creating massive amounts of useful data that is critical to making informed health care decisions,” said Jay Shah, Executive Vice President, Octo. “The QSRS platform is crucial to improving our nation’s health care system by providing hospitals with a tool to help them identify and mitigate adverse events such as post-surgery hospital infections. We’re honored that AHRQ believes in our agile approaches and has entrusted the care, maintenance and improvement of the QSRS platform to us. We’re excited to work with AHRQ to improve the safety and quality of health care across the country.”
While this contract represents Octo’s first engagement with AHRQ, Octo has had several ongoing and past engagements across the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for the past 10 years. The period of performance for the BPA is five years with a $10 million ceiling. Octo partnered with IMPAQ International, LLC. IMPAQ helps governments, businesses, foundations, non-profits, and universities enhance programs and policies, and has previously been a subcontractor supporting development of QSRS.
Octo is an industry-leading, award-winning provider of digital services for the Federal Government. Octo specializes in providing agile software development, user experience design, and cloud engineering services that address the government’s most pressing missions and modernization challenges.
Octo is one of only 11 private companies in the United States to have been appraised at CMMI® Level 4 for Software Development Maturity (CMMI-DEV constellation). In addition, Octo also maintains ISO 9001:2008, ISO 20000:2013, and ISO 27001:2013 certifications and is one of only seven government contractors that is a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Gold Partner: an industry-accepted framework for developing software applications using Agile development principles.
Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Octo has additional offices in Alexandria, Virginia and Fulton, Maryland. Learn more at octoconsulting.com.