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

ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization (PSO), a leader in analyzing safety data associated with electronic health records, has launched 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, professional societies, 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 in a vacuum,” 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 and analytics. Through collaboration, the Partnership taps into pooled 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)

         California Hospital PSO

         Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)

         Institute for Safer Medication Practices (ISMP)

         Kentucky Institute for Patient Safety and Quality

         Michigan Hospital Association PSO

         Midwest Alliance for Patient Safety

         National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF)

         Ohio Patient Safety Institute

         PSO of Florida

         Tennessee Center for Patient Safety

         Virginia PSO

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; David W. Bates, MD, MSc, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and many others. To view the current list of collaborators and advisory panel members, click here.