Safety Excellence Award

ECRI and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices PSO’s Safety Excellence Award will be presented each year to recognize outstanding patient safety efforts and initiatives undertaken by member healthcare institutions to improve safety-related outcomes for patients, families, visitors, and staff.

The deadline for submissions is August 15, 2024.

Application criteria

To be eligible for the ECRI and the ISMP PSO Safety Excellence Award, applicants must meet the following criteria:

• Be a current member of ECRI and the ISMP PSO
• Have participated in the creation and implementation of a healthcare safety and quality improvement project, program, or initiative from its inception to completion
• Utilized ECRI and the ISMP PSO resources, tools, or patient safety analyst support to implement the project, program, or initiative
• Be able to demonstrate improvement of your organization’s safety and quality performance outcomes

What the winner receives

• Honorary award for prominent display at the winning institution
• Announcement of the award winning organization during the ECRI and ISMP PSO Annual Meeting
• Publicity in ECRI press announcements, website, and social media
• Opportunity to present the winning safety initiative on an ECRI and the ISMP PSO monthly webinar
• Feature in the ECRI and the ISMP PSO 2023 Annual Report

The award winner will be featured on the ECRI and ISMP PSO web portal for members to read about their accomplishments and view the winning submission.

How we choose the winner

Submissions will be reviewed by members of ECRI and the ISMP PSO staff, who will select the top applications for additional review by a panel of independent judges. Judges will consider the following criteria in their review:

• Impact: achievement of a significant level of improvement
• Culture of Safety: promotion of key elements of organizational culture of safety
• Scale: reproducibility and scalability of initiative
• Innovation: innovative use of ECRI and the ISMP PSO and other resources and approach to drive improvement

How to apply

Submit a short summary describing the safety initiative undertaken at your facility that demonstrates excellence in healthcare safety and quality improvement.

Initiatives may relate to any healthcare safety endeavor, such as reducing patient safety events, reducing healthcare disparities, use of causal analysis tools, improving safety culture, pandemic response efforts, medication safety strategies, infection prevention, patient and family engagement, and staff training.

Important: Please do not include any patient safety work product, protected health information, or personally identifiable information of staff or patients in the submission.

Submission format

• Title of project, program, or initiative
• Name of organization
• Name, title, and email of person submitting award application
• Opportunity for Improvement. What was the safety problem you were trying to solve?
• Goal. What was the ultimate goal for your project?
• Interventions and Innovations. What methods did you use to address the challenge? What actions did you take? How did you engage leadership and frontline staff? Were there innovations: created and tested through the process?
• PSO support. How did you use ECRI and the ISMP PSO support, strategies, and/or tools for this program/project? Could include using event analysis data, RCA or causal analysis, safe tables, learnings from educational events, the Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns, Deep Dive, PSO other guidance and research materials.
• Outcome. What did data analysis show? What did you achieve? What was the outcome? What was the impact? Provide evidence of improvement, if available (e.g., measurements of performance before and after implementing the solution). The more information you can provide about what was accomplished, the better we can judge your submission.
• Sustainability and Spread. What are the plans to maintain and spread the success from this initiative?
• Intellectual/Financial Disclosure Statement. At the end of your submission, please disclose any potentially relevant intellectual, proprietary, or financial relationships/conflicts by responding to the two statements listed in the next section.

By submitting an application, you grant ECRI permission to use information from the application essay, in whole or in part, in published materials, and/or its PSO deliverables.

Disclosure statements

ECRI has strict conflict-of-interest rules and accepts no grants, gifts, finder's fees, or custom consulting projects from medical device or pharmaceutical companies, and our employees are not permitted to own stock shares in medical device or pharmaceutical firms. ECRI does not require that applicants for the PSO Safety Excellence Award adhere to the same conflict-of-interest rules that apply to its own staff. Nevertheless, information about an applicant's business, financial, or professional relationships pertaining to the initiative described in your submission will help us put the application in the proper context and assist with identifying any potential conflicts.

Please respond to the following statements within your submission:

• Statement 1. State whether the applicant (healthcare facility) or any of the individuals involved in the project currently have, previously had, or expect to engage in any activities that would give them a financial interest in, or help them derive a benefit from, a commercial product or service that is used in the project described within the application for the PSO Safety Excellence Award. Examples include: being employed by, having a consulting arrangement with, or receiving (or expecting to receive) funding or other financial considerations from the supplier/manufacturer of a medical device or service that is described in the application.
• Statement 2. State whether any third party owns, or retains rights to, any of the materials or information that you have provided as part of your submission, and whether there is anything that would restrict ECRI from sharing or distributing the information provided in your submission.

If no such relationships exist, applicant must state that: "No third-party financial relationships or restrictions exist" to certify that no such relationships exist. If a real, or potential, financial relationship or restriction exists between the applicant and a third party, please describe the relationship(s) in detail.

ECRI reserves the right to request additional information about financial relationships or potential conflicts of interest at any time during the application process and after an award is made.