AtStaff Corporation Names Sharon Eck Birmingham as Chief Nursing Executive.

DURHAM, N.C. -- AtStaff, a leader in healthcare demand management and staff management software solutions, has named Sharon Eck Birmingham, DNSc, RN, to serve as the company's chief nursing executive.

"Sharon brings to AtStaff more than 23 years of leadership experience in nursing administration, practice, education and research, and is a recognized expert on the impact of nurse staffing on clinical, organizational and financial outcomes," says Beth Pickard, president and chief executive officer at AtStaff. "Her knowledge and expertise in evidence-based, outcomes-driven nurse staffing and her passion for nursing care uniquely support and benefit AtStaff in its mission to improve the quality of patient care, patient safety, patient throughput, and caregiver morale and satisfaction."

"There's a strong relationship between ensuring adequate levels of nurse staffing and achieving positive patient outcomes and patient safety," says Pickard. "Our company is focused on helping hospitals align the right staffing workload to achieve optimal results for each patient. Sharon will play a key role in our efforts. She is at the vanguard of a movement to establish and implement staffing standards, and measure and track nursing-sensitive indicators that will lead to improved patient outcomes as well as higher nurse satisfaction."

Birmingham has served as a nurse manager, director, chief nurse, nursing consultant, and adjunct faculty member at some of the country's leading hospitals and academic medical centers. She currently is an adjunct assistant professor at The University of North Carolina School of Nursing at Chapel Hill.

Before becoming a nursing consultant in 2005, Birmingham served as director of Nursing Outcomes at Duke University Hospital. Prior to that, she served as director of The Women's Hospital & Clinics at The University of North Carolina Hospitals for five years.

Birmingham obtained her doctoral degree from Yale University, where she focused on the uses of existing data in improving healthcare decision-making. She conducted her doctoral dissertation on "The Effect of Nurse Staffing on Clinical, Organizational and Financial Outcomes." This research won the Yale School of Nursing Dissertation Prize.

"I am honored to join AtStaff," says Birmingham. "I recognized very early in my discussions with the company's leadership that AtStaff is genuinely committed to make a difference in healthcare, and positively impact healthcare quality, safety, and workplace satisfaction. I look forward to working with the AtStaff team of experts to better serve hospitals and ambulatory practices with evidenced-based staffing processes and technologies that support professional nursing practice and yield improved clinical and organizational outcomes.

"I'm also eager to contribute to ongoing efforts by AtStaff to integrate the tracking of nursing-sensitive quality and administrative indicators, nursing research, standardized languages, and data for regulatory compliance into the product development process, and in assisting hospitals to attain Magnet Recognition and Malcolm Baldridge Awards."

Birmingham obtained her bachelor's degree in nursing and master's degree in nursing administration from The University of Iowa. In the late 1980s, she was involved in the initial research efforts to develop Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) and the Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC). NIC and NOC are standardized languages for documenting nursing interventions and nursing-sensitive patient outcomes.

She is a member of The American Nurses Association, The American Organization of Nurse Executives, Sigma Theta Tau Honor Society, and the American Academy of Ambulatory Nursing.

About AtStaff Corporation

AtStaff develops demand management and staff management software that enables healthcare organizations to improve healthcare quality and patient safety, increase profitability, and enhance staff recruitment and retention. Hospital enterprise solutions and physician scheduling systems from AtStaff serve more than 1,200 healthcare organizations, medical facilities, nursing departments and group practices.

ClairVia[TM]* is AtStaff's outcomes-driven, demand management solution. Its science-based, patient-tracking technology enables healthcare organizations to monitor and measure patient demand and maintain the correct mix of clinical staffing for patient demand requirements. ClairVia has the most advanced predictive capabilities on the market, using event-driven Patient Progress Patterns to predict clinical workload demands and constantly refine the accuracy of those projections. Hospitals using ClairVia are able to build a reputation for superior patient safety, better patient experience and clinician satisfaction, while optimizing both their clinical and financial outcomes.

More information is available at www.clairvia.com.

* Patent Pending