ECRI Institute

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Diagnostic Errors Top ECRI Institute’s Patient Safety Concerns for 2018

Press Release | ECRI Institute | March 12, 2018

ECRI Institute names diagnostic errors the number one concern on its 2018 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations. Each year, approximately 1 in 20 adults experiences a diagnostic error, according to published studies. These errors and delays can lead to care gaps, repeat testing, unnecessary procedures, and patient harm. “Diagnostic errors are not only common, but they can have serious consequences," says Gail M. Horvath, MSN, RN, CNOR, CRCST, patient safety analyst, ECRI Institute. "A lot of hospital deaths that were attributed to the normal course of disease may have been the result of diagnostic error."
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Doctors Are Overloaded with Electronic Alerts, and That’s Bad for Patients

Shefali Luthra | The Washington Post | June 13, 2016

Some people receive constant reminders on their smartphones: birthdays, anniversaries, doctor’s appointments, social engagements. At work, their computers prompt them to meet deadlines, attend meetings and have lunch with the boss. Prodding here and pinging there, these pop-up interruptions can turn into noise to be ignored instead of helpful nudges. Something similar is happening to doctors, nurses and pharmacists. And when they’re hit with too much information, the result can be a health hazard...

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ECRI Execs: Poor Usability, Missing Safeguards Lead Health IT Trouble Spots

Jessica Davis | Healthcare IT News | March 2, 2016

Health information technology safety is much like highway safety: It's not just the driver or vehicle that causes an accident, but often other contributing factors that culminate into bigger problems. HIT errors don't have a single culprit like product malfunction or user error - all signs point to a bigger issue and call for behavioral and industry change. This is according to Ronni P. Solomon, executive vice president, general counsel, ECRI Institute, who opened a HIMSS16 session on Wednesday about health it safety hazards, by shedding light on elements that contribute to errors and promoting a call to action on how health IT is managed...

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ECRI Institute Committed to Building National Health IT Safety Collaborative

Press Release | ECRI Institute, Alliance for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (AQIPS), Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), Pew Charitable Trusts | March 16, 2018

Building on the Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety, a multi-stakeholder collaborative, ECRI Institute is now responding to the call for a national program focused on improving health IT safety. ECRI Institute, together with the Alliance for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (AQIPS), the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), and the Pew Charitable Trusts, sent a letter to the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) informing them of their shared vision for a national health IT safety collaborative. The letter includes the key characteristics needed for its success.

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ECRI Institute Releases Top 10 Health Technology Hazards Report For 2013

Press Release | ECRI Institute | November 5, 2012

While today’s health technology advances provide countless new ways to improve patient care, some also create new opportunities for harm.  And with the evolution of healthcare information technology systems such as electronic health records (EHRs), there’s a growing level of complexity and opportunity for error.

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EHRs, Clinical Decision Support Top 2017 Patient Safety Hazard List

Jennifer Bresnick | Health IT Analytics | March 15, 2017

Information management errors in electronic health records, incorrect use of clinical decision support, and poor prescribing habits are among the most dangerous health IT hazards for 2017, according to ECRI Institute’s annual patient safety list. The repeat offenders are joined by a number of workflow and process shortfalls that can leave hospitalized patients without sufficient monitoring, lead to costly and deadly hospital-acquired infections, and open up serious behavioral health risks...

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Hazards Tied to Medical Records Rush

Christopher Rowland | Boston Globe | July 20, 2014

Subsidies given for computerizing, but no reporting required when errors cause harm

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Health Information Errors Cited Among Top 10 Health IT Hazards

Susan D. Hall | FierceHealthIT | November 6, 2012

Three of the 10 top health technology hazards cited in a report from ECRI Institute deal with errors in information management. Read More »

New Recall Management Tool Matches Alerts Directly to Hospitals' Equipment Inventory Data

Press Release | ECRI Institute | May 23, 2016

The faster a hospital responds to a product safety alert or recall, the safer its patients are. But with dozens of alerts and recalls issued every week by FDA, manufacturers, and other organizations, how can busy hospital staff quickly see which ones have the potential to affect their own patients?Today, ECRI Institute announces the release of Automatch™ for Equipment, the newest enhancement to its Alerts Tracker™ automated recall management solution used by hospitals and health systems worldwide...

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Plug and Play Healthcare: Open Middleware and the Emergence of a Functional Interoperability Framework

“A middleware architecture has been shown to be the best technological solution for addressing the problem of EHR interoperability. The middleware platform facilitates the transparent, yet secure, access of patient health data, directly from the various databases where it is stored. A server-based middleware framework supporting access to the various patient health data stores allows for a scalable, unified and standardized platform for applications to be developed upon.  The middleware architectural design has been successfully used to link data from multiple databases, irrespective to the database platform or where the database is located,” says Voltz. Read More »

Providers Reluctant To Address EHR, Health IT Patient Safety

Jennifer Bresnick | EHRIntelligence.com | July 16, 2014

Healthcare providers struggle to address patient safety issues created by their EHRs and other health IT infrastructure, says a new report by the RAND Corporation and funded by the ONC...

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This Algorithm Accidentally Predicted Which Hospital Patients Were Most Likely To Die

Stephanie M. Lee | Buzz Feed News | September 19, 2016

Sepsis is one of the biggest hospital hazards you’ve maybe never heard of. When the body overreacts to an infection, it can trigger widespread inflammation that can in turn cause tissue damage and organ failure. It causes one-third to one-half of all deaths in US hospitals. But because sepsis’s symptoms, like fever and difficulty breathing, sometimes look a lot like other illnesses, it can be hard to detect, especially in the early stages. So a team at Banner Health, a hospital system in Phoenix, Arizona, turned to computer science for a solution...

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Wall Street Journal: "ObamaCare’s Electronic-Records Debacle"

This Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Op-Ed could have been entitled "President Sucker: Led Down the Garden Path by The Healthcare IT Industry." It is entitled "ObamaCare’s Electronic-Records Debacle", as below.  First, though: On Feb. 18, 2009 the WSJ published the following Letter to the Editor authored by me...I have a different view on who is deceiving whom. In fact, it is the government that has been deceived by the HIT industry and its pundits. Stated directly, the administration is deluded about the true difficulty of making large-scale health IT work. The beneficiaries will largely be the IT industry and IT management consultants.

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