Vision Facilities Management Announces Real-Time ECRI Integration

New two-way communication interface with ECRI Institute improves patient safety, recall tracking, and healthcare asset management.

PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa. and TORONTO, Aug. 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Vision Facilities Management Limited, a leading provider of integrated healthcare asset management software, announces the launch of a new two-way communication interface with ECRI Institute that will significantly improve the ability of hospital staff to manage medical device safety alerts and recalls. VisionFM +HEALTHCARE has earned the ECRI Institute Integrated status and now offers academic and large community hospitals the benefit of easier, faster and more accurate medical equipment inventory control, as well as more effective responses to medical device safety alerts and recalls.

Being ECRI Institute Integrated allows healthcare facilities to seamlessly access medical device and manufacturer codes directly within VisionFM +HEALTHCARE, eliminating the inefficiencies of working between two separate applications. ECRI Institute's Universal Medical Device Nomenclature System™ (UMDNS™), the industry standard vocabulary and coding system with thousands of users worldwide, and Health Devices International Sourcebase, an online medical device database, are both being integrated into VisionFM +HEALTHCARE, aligning inventory control with device safety alerts.

"Incorporating ECRI Institute's device and manufacturer codes not only helped automate the response to alerts, it substantially improved our equipment inventory and preventative maintenance scheduling for biomedical devices," says Chris Dodds, President of Vision Facilities Management Ltd.

The interface of ECRI Institute's Alerts Tracker™, a Web-based, automated hazard and recall alert management system and VisionFM +HEALTHCARE simplifies the process of effectively responding to alerts. The ECRI Integration makes it easier for users to determine whether equipment involved in a hazard and recall alert is currently in their inventory, and also stores the status of work orders issued in VisionFM +HEALTHCARE in the user's Alerts Tracker database at ECRI Institute.

"With the new interface in place, hospitals can provide a more effective response to patient safety alerts and recalls, reducing hospital risk and improving patient safety," says James P. Keller Jr., Vice President, Health Technology Evaluation and Safety, ECRI Institute.

ECRI Institute offers similar real-time Web services to all vendors of computerized maintenance management services. Please visit www.ecri.org/CMMS for product presentations about VisionFM +HEALTHCARE or contact ECRI Institute for details by e-mail at [email protected], by phone at (610) 825-6000, ext. 5891, or by mail at 5200 Butler Pike, Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462.

About ECRI Institute

ECRI Institute (www.ecri.org), a nonprofit organization, dedicates itself to bringing the discipline of applied scientific research to healthcare to uncover the best approaches to improving patient care.  As a pioneer in this science for 43 years, ECRI Institute marries experience and independence with the objectivity of evidence-based research.  ECRI Institute is designated a Collaborating Centre of the World Health Organization and an Evidence-based Practice Centre by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.  ECRI Institute PSO is designated a Patient Safety Organization by the U.S. Agency for Health and Human Sciences under the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005.

About Vision Facilities Management

Vision Facilities Management (www.visionfm.com) is a provider of integrated healthcare asset management software to healthcare corporate and clinical support teams.  Since 1995, academic and large community hospitals have been utilizing VisionFM +HEALTHCARE to significantly improve facility / equipment asset management and patient safety through the introduction of preventative maintenance best practices.  Vision Facility Management's application VisionFM +HEALTHCARE is represented exclusively by CAPPstone Incorporated (www.cappstone.com).

SOURCE ECRI Institute