Customer Story | Feb 2026
How Carteret Health Care Built a Sustainable Program with symplr Midas®
Customer profile:
See performance as it happens
Reduce chart review burden
Catch issues instantly
No manual measure updates
Quality leaders today are expected to deliver timely insight, measurable improvement, and regulatory readiness, often with limited staff and expanding requirements. At Carteret Health Care, a single-hospital system on the North Carolina coast, those expectations are managed by a small team responsible for value-based reporting, quality performance, and patient safety.
For Dawn Perez, Director of Value-Based Reporting and Decision Support, success depends on having accurate data, efficient workflows, and the flexibility to adapt as quality measures evolve. By using symplr Midas as the foundation of its quality program, Carteret Health Care has shifted from retrospective reporting to proactive performance improvement, while reducing administrative burden across departments.
As a small health system, Carteret Health Care faces the same regulatory pressures as much larger organizations, without the benefit of additional staff or specialized teams. Quality reporting requirements from CMS, The Joint Commission, and other accrediting bodies continue to expand, particularly as value-based care models place greater emphasis on outcomes, benchmarking, and continuous improvement.
“Like many small hospitals, we’re stretched thin,” Perez said. “People are wearing multiple hats, and quality reporting requirements continue to grow every year.”
Before adopting symplr Midas, Carteret relied heavily on hospital-specific CMS reports and fragmented processes. Because the data was retrospective, it offered limited insight into current performance and made it difficult to prioritize improvement efforts or prepare for future requirements.
“We were getting CMS reports, but the data was old,” Perez explained. “We didn’t have a way to see current trends or understand how we were likely to perform in the future.”
Carteret Health Care implemented symplr Midas in 2013 and gradually expanded its use across quality, risk, infection prevention, care management, and performance improvement. Today, Midas serves as the backbone of the organization’s quality infrastructure.
“Midas is absolutely essential to what we do and continues to be the backbone of many of our quality programs,” Perez said.
A key capability that Midas provides for Carteret Health is continuously updated outcomes data aligned with current CMS specifications. Instead of manually maintaining thousands of ICD-10 codes and measure definitions, the quality team can rely on Data Vision to keep measures accurate as regulations change.
“CMS specifications change every year,” Perez noted. “Having outcomes data that stays up to date saves an incredible amount of time and effort.”
Automation within Midas has significantly improved how Carteret supports infection prevention and regulatory reporting. Perez built automated worklists and alerts that notify the infection preventionist when specific triggers occur, such as a patient death paired with a positive flu diagnosis.
“We’re required to report flu-related deaths,” Perez said. “With Midas, I built a worklist that automatically sends an email notification when that situation occurs. This presents information much more concurrently than performing manual reviews of EMR reports and charts.”
Previously, identifying these cases required time-consuming retrospective chart reviews. With automation in place, the process is faster, more reliable, and less disruptive, allowing staff to focus on investigation and prevention rather than data collection.
“This automation helps to overcome very challenging data collection,” Perez added.
Before Midas, Carteret had limited visibility into measures such as readmissions, mortality, patient safety indicators, and hospital-acquired conditions. Today, Midas enables the organization to monitor these metrics concurrently and identify trends earlier.
“Now we can see what’s happening in near real time and understand how we’re likely to perform in the future,” Perez said. “That’s critical for value-based purchasing and public reporting.”
Benchmarking within Midas also allows Carteret to compare performance against peer hospitals. This insight supports leadership discussions, balanced scorecards, and unit-level dashboards.
“We use benchmarking to understand how we’re performing relative to other Midas hospitals,” Perez explained. “That context helps teams focus their improvement efforts where it matters most.”
Unlike rigid, preconfigured reporting tools, Midas allows Carteret to tailor reports, audits, and focus studies to its specific workflows, patient population, and regulatory priorities.
“Every hospital is different,” Perez said. “Having the ability to customize reports and audits is crucial.”
Carteret uses focus studies to evaluate compliance with clinical policies and identify process gaps that contribute to outcomes such as readmissions, pressure injuries, and infections. These studies support targeted action planning and regulatory readiness.
“For pressure injuries, we look at what clinical gaps contributed, such as missed turns or documentation issues,” Perez explained. “For infection prevention, we audit processes around Foley catheters and central lines so we can focus on what we can actually improve.”
As CMS introduces new and future-focused quality measures, Carteret uses Midas to anticipate performance and begin improvements early. Perez uses hospital-acquired condition data in Midas to monitor pressure injuries now, years before related measures are expected to become mandatory.
“We’re using that data to gauge how we’ll perform once those measures are required,” Perez said. “It helps us make changes now instead of reacting later.”
With new CMS pillars emerging around wellness and prevention, Perez believes proactive data capabilities will become even more important.
“I really don’t know how organizations can stay ahead of value-based care without a quality system like this,” she said.
By centralizing quality data, automating workflows, and enabling deep customization, symplr Midas helps Carteret Health Care:
Reduce manual reporting and chart review
Provide timely, actionable insights for quality improvement
Conclusion
For organizations reassessing their quality technology, Perez recommends focusing on capabilities that support long-term sustainability, not just short-term reporting needs.
First, outcomes data must stay aligned with constantly changing CMS specifications. Maintaining measure logic, exclusions, and code sets manually is not realistic over time, especially for small teams. Having a system that keeps this data current in the background allows quality leaders to focus on improvement instead of maintenance.
Second, flexibility is essential. Quality programs cannot succeed with rigid, one-size-fits-all tools. The ability to customize reports, audits, and focus studies ensures that data reflects how each hospital actually operates, rather than forcing teams to adapt their workflows to the software.
“Some systems are very canned,” Perez said. “Midas isn’t, and that’s what makes it so valuable.”
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