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.
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, TheUniversity 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.
