New contract gives U.S. Naval hospitals access to ECRI Institute's medical equipment advisory service and product safety alerts

ECRI Institute®(www.ecri.org), an independent nonprofit that researches the best approaches to improving patient care, announces a new contract, awarded by the U.S. Navy to ECRI Institute, to offer its comprehensive advisory service for managing medical equipment procurement, maintenance, and safety to all U.S. Naval hospitals and medical centers worldwide.

The new, expanded contract provides access to Health Devices Gold™ (HD Gold™), a service delivering a broad suite of information resources used to guide the selection, use, maintenance and management of healthcare technologies.  Health Devices Gold includes ECRI Institute's Health Devices System™, which provides comparative evaluations, guidance articles, hazard and recall alerts, and user experience reports on a wide range of medical technologies;  the Healthcare Product Comparison System™ (HPCS™), a comparative database of over 450 types of capital medical devices; and Health Devices International Sourcebase Online®, a medical device and manufacturer database with profiles of over 15,000 medical equipment manufacturers, suppliers, and servicers.

"We are excited to expand our relationship with the U.S. Navy to include Health Devices Gold," says James P. Keller, Jr., Vice President, Health Technology Evaluation and Safety, ECRI Institute. "The U.S. Navy is taking a leadership role in its commitment to making medical technology management and patient safety a priority.  We're looking forward to helping its hospitals make better procurement decisions and identify medical products that might be putting members of our armed forces at risk."

Says Jason Jones, HM 1 (FMF), U.S. Naval Medical Logistics Command, "Navy Medicine has 19 different Military Medicine Commands. Our new Health Devices Gold membership will be a resource for each of these medical commands and will be used on a daily basis to help complete their missions. The new ECRI Institute membership also provides the Navy an important new partner in helping to address today's challenging medical technology issues."   

The new arrangement with the U.S. Navy broadens ECRI Institute's scope of support services to the U.S. armed forces. For more than 25 years, the U.S. Air Force has relied on ECRI Institute's expertise as offered in its membership programs, including Alerts Tracker™, a Web-based, automated hazards and recall alerts system; Health Devices System; and International Sourcebase.

The Air Force has also recently renewed its membership in ECRI Institute's Healthcare Risk Control System® (HRC®), a program that provides actionable recommendations, tools, sample policies and procedures, and other sources of practical advice for minimizing risk and ensuring patient safety. All of these programs serve more than 80 Air Force facilities worldwide, and some facilities also subscribe to the Healthcare Product Comparison System.  

"The important collaboration between ECRI Institute and the U.S. Naval and Air Force hospitals and medical centers represents a shared commitment to providing enhanced levels of medical equipment management, maintenance, and safety to the facilities that offer care to our service men and women around the globe," continues James Keller.