Insights & News in Healthcare Safety

Rethinking Incident Investigations in Aging Services

Decisions made and actions taken in the first minutes and hours after an incident occurs in an aging services organization set the stage for everything else that follows. For instance, consider thi...

The EtO Sterilization Dilemma

Ethylene oxide (EtO) sterilization has been in the news a lot lately, and healthcare has much at stake. According to officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), approximately 56% of a...

Diagnosing Communication Gaps in Diagnostic Test Reporting

In the United States, there are 30 times more outpatient visits as hospital discharges. As a result of the high volumes and complexities inherent to ambulatory settings, one in twenty patients can ...

Outsmarting an Impossible Medical Equipment Budget

When Washington Adventist Hospital of Maryland hired ECRI Institute to provide equipment planning services for their new 170-bed hospital, they were in a financial bind. Their Certificate of Need (...

Safer Opioid Prescribing through Health IT

Editorial Note: This blog was also co-authored by Shari Medina, MD, of Harris Healthcare, chair of EHRA’s Patient Safety Work Group who led the Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety’s workgroup ...

ECRI Data Help Reignite Support for Patient Identifier in Congress

After heart disease and cancer, medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States and include misdiagnoses, incorrect anesthesia, delayed treatment, and patient misidentifica...

Three Costly Pitfalls of Purchased Services Contracts

Purchased services are seen as the next great savings frontier in healthcare—and with good reason. Spend on purchased services accounts for approximately 30 to 35 percent of a hospital’s non-labor ...

4 Ways to Prevent Harm from Surgical Staplers

If you’ve been following medical device safety issues this year, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the headlines about patient injuries and deaths related to internal surgical staplers. The devices...

Avoiding the Blame Game in Preventing Medical Errors

In late 2017, a catastrophic medication error led to a patient death at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. While waiting for a PET scan, an elderly woman was incorrectly administered vecuronium,...