Ditching the cape and skin-tight suit for a lab coat and scrubs, today’s superheroes are saving lives through the magic of application technology.

AkkeNeel Talsma, UW-Milwaukee’s Walter Schraeder Chair for Nursing, has worked around the Midwest as a nurse in quality improvement for more than 20 years. Growing tired of collecting data on yellow pads, Excel spreadsheets, and running pivot tables to generate reports, she felt hospitals were spending too much time collecting data and not enough on implementing changes.

Determined to bring change, Talsma established Melius Outcomes in July 2015, with two Ph.D. operating room nurses, Melissa Bathish and Cathy Kleiner, joining in 2016.

Melius Outcomes is developed as “software as a service” business in which the data analytics and quality reporting take place in the internet cloud and are released to user devices such as PCs, tablets, and smart phones through an app.

Just as a “Fitbit” may tell you to drink more water or get your steps to maintain your health, Melius Outcomes can spot problems in real time and provide on-the-spot solutions and online resources without the guesswork.

Quality reporting describes the information clinicians need to become informed about a hospital’s quality of care. This could include costs, patient information and data analyses. For example, if a patient develops an infection, questions that might arise include: Did this patient get the right antibiotic? Was the skin cleaned before incision? Was the air filtering appropriate?

The duty of quality reporting is falling on nurses, which steals time from patients. Nurses chase after data, running from department to department, and usually are short on time to fix quality problems. Read the full story here.