The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services formally designated ECRI as a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) in 2008. Since then, our PSO has studied nearly 4 million adverse events and near misses from over 1,400 healthcare providers nationwide across acute, ambulatory, and aging services. In this episode, we'll explore what it means to be and participate in a PSO and the evidence for how participation can benefit patient safety, and we'll briefly review some of the legal challenges to PSO protections.

Today, we're talking about ECRI's 2021 list of the Top 10 Health Technology Hazards. This report is intended to identify potential sources of danger that we believe warrant the greatest attention for the coming year and offer practical recommendations for reducing the risks. The 2021 list features all new topics. Several focus on hazards that have developed in today’s environment of unprecedented stresses and rapid technological changes.

This podcast is part of ECRI's ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In today’s episode, Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD, President and CEO of ECRI, discusses our position paper on the fast-tracked development of COVID-19 vaccines. During recent FDA public hearings and within the paper, ECRI warns that rushing to deploy vaccines before all the data has been collected and evaluated could lead to increased risk for patients, not to mention harm to public trust in vaccines in general.

Interested in learning more? Contact us at (610) 825-6000 or [email protected].

This is a special episode produced in conjunction with our colleagues in ECRI's Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety. The Partnership is working with EHRA to explore how health IT can help integrate behavioral health and primary care. This podcast is the second part of our conversation.

During that first discussion, we spoke about how many Americans with behavioral health conditions receive their behavioral care from their primary care providers, but only one-third of patients with behavioral health conditions report receiving the care they need.

In this episode, we'll look at what the workgroup learned about how technology can facilitate this integration, how we can use health IT to increase access to care, and whether health IT can help clinicians from various disciplines speak with one another and share information to facilitate safe, effective, quality care.

Interested in learning more? Contact us at (610) 825-6000 or [email protected].

In this episode, we're talking about bone graft substitutes—a type of device that can lead to a lot of confusion among purchasers and providers because of all the varieties available. These substances are used as alternatives to autologous bone grafts in orthopedic procedures such as filling of bone voids, arthrodesis (i.e., bone joint fusion), repair of bone fractures, or healing of bone surrounding implanted devices (e.g., knee/hip prostheses, bone screws).

Our guests will describe some common misconceptions about bone graft substitutes and steps organizations can take to improve safety and purchasing procedures.

Interested in learning more? Contact us at (610) 825-6000 or [email protected].

This is a special episode produced in conjunction with our colleagues in ECRI's Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety.

​The Partnership is convening a workgroup to derive safe practices to reduce CPOE alert fatigue through monitoring, analysis, and optimization. John McGreevey, MD, University of Pennsylvania, and Adam Wright, PhD, Vanderbilt, are the collaborators co-chairing the workgroup.

In this episode, we’re talking to the workgroup’s co-chairs about the burden providers face from alerts, the impact on patient safety, and how the workgroup will identify potential solutions that can be implemented in large and small organization alike.

Interested in learning more? Contact us at (610) 825-6000 or [email protected].

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for drastic social distancing measures included banning visitors at most nursing homes throughout the U.S. in an attempt to protect some of the most vulnerable among us. That ban, however, carried with it a real emotional burden for persons served and families unable to visit their loved ones, not to mention facility staff.

In this episode, we're talking about the steps involved in reopening nursing homes to visitors. As some parts of the country continue to relax distancing rules while others are forced to reinstate some rules, we talk about the considerations for opening allowing visitors and how to do so safely when the time is right.

Learn more about how ECRI can help from our website at www.ecri.org, where you'll find our COVID-19 Resource Center with publicly available resources to help providers across the continuum of care, including ECRI's position paper Aging Services Visitation Guidelines in the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Interested in learning more? Contact us at (610) 825-6000 or [email protected].

We all want answers to critical questions such as: How much longer will the SARS-COV-2 pandemic last? Is social distancing working? Are the tests reliable? Do any treatments work? The world is swimming in SARS-COV-2 scientific data rushed to publication even before peer review.

In this episode, we're talking about some of the statistical models used to try to understand the future of the pandemic. We’ll discuss key questions both consumers and healthcare provider organizations should ask as they evaluate those models and judge how much—or how little—to rely on them.

Learn more about how ECRI can help from our website at www.ecri.org, where you'll find our COVID-19 Resource Center with publicly available resources to help providers across the continuum of care, including ECRI's position paper COVID-19 Models: Why Do Projections Differ.

Interested in learning more? Contact us at (610) 825-6000 or [email protected].