ECRI Institute PSO Leads First Multi-Stakeholder Collaborative on Health IT Safety

PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa., March 31, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization (PSO), a leader in analyzing adverse events, including those associated with electronic health records, announces the launch of the first multi-stakeholder partnership to generate new knowledge on safe health IT practices.

The Partnership for Promoting Health IT Patient Safety creates a national framework to proactively identify health IT safety issues within a non-punitive learning environment to improve health IT patient safety. It is the first program of its kind to provide collaboration among health IT vendors, providers, PSOs, policymakers, and others toward achieving health IT-enabled patient safety.

"The innovation comes in because we've invited vendors to participate in this collaborative, so it won't just be a patient safety organization, or a clinician, or an expert looking at these events," states Ronni Solomon, JD, executive vice president and general counsel, ECRI Institute. "And we're all going to be looking at what's happening, why it's happening, and what we can do to prevent it," noted Solomon in a recent video interview with Hospitals & Health Networks. 

The safety of health IT is a shared responsibility and effective health IT safety interventions require detailed reviews of adverse events. The Partnership taps into this combined expertise to study health IT-related events and hazards, identify promising solutions and best practices, and engage stakeholders in sharing the lessons learned.

"We will now be able to analyze similar issues but through different lenses and better identify the breaks in the process that may only be apparent to one stakeholder," says Karen P. Zimmer, MD, MPH, FAAP, medical director, ECRI Institute PSO.

"For example, a system may work well in stage and even when implemented, but if a provider creates a work-around, there may be unintended consequences. We are hoping to enhance the learnings and then together come up with solutions that would address these issues," adds Zimmer.

Collaborating organizations include:

• Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI)
• American College of Physician Executives (ACPE)
• American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA)
• Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS)
• American Medical Information Association (AMIA)
• Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)
• Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP)
• National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF)

A distinguished panel of experts participating on the advisory panel include Peter J. Pronovost, MD, PhD, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Hardeep Singh, MD, MPH, Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center; Dean Sittig, PhD, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, School of Biomedical Informatics; and many others. To view the current list of collaborators and advisory panel members, click here.

For information about The Partnership for Promoting Health IT Patient Safety or ECRI Institute PSO, e-mail [email protected], call (610) 825-6000, ext. 5558, or write to us at 5200 Butler Pike, Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462.

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About ECRI Institute
For 45 years, ECRI Institute's work in patient safety, adverse event reporting and analysis, and development of recommendations has improved patient care at hospitals and other providers around the world. The ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization is a component of ECRI Institute, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to improving the safety, quality, and cost-effectiveness of patient care. ECRI Institute has a long history of investigating events and publishing authoritative risk reduction strategies. ECRI Institute is designated as an Evidence-based Practice Center by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. ECRI Institute developed and implements the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Reporting System, a mandatory error and near-miss reporting program for Pennsylvania hospitals and other healthcare facilities, under contract to the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority, winner of the 2006 John M. Eisenberg Award. For more information, visit www.ecri.org. Find ECRI Institute on Facebook (www.facebook.com/ECRIInstitute) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/ECRI_Institute).

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