Vision Facilities Management launches new 2-way communication interface with ECRI Institute

New two-way communication interface with ECRI Institute improves patient safety, recall tracking, and healthcare asset management.

Vision Facilities Management Limited, a leading provider of integrated healthcare asset management software, announces the launch of a new two-way communication interface with ECRI Institute that will significantly improve the ability of hospital staff to manage medical device safety alerts and recalls. VisionFM +HEALTHCARE has earned the ECRI Institute Integrated status and now offers academic and large community hospitals the benefit of easier, faster and more accurate medical equipment inventory control, as well as more effective responses to medical device safety alerts and recalls.

Being ECRI Institute Integrated allows healthcare facilities to seamlessly access medical device and manufacturer codes directly within VisionFM +HEALTHCARE, eliminating the inefficiencies of working between two separate applications. ECRI Institute's Universal Medical Device Nomenclature System™ (UMDNS™), the industry standard vocabulary and coding system with thousands of users worldwide, and Health Devices International Sourcebase, an online medical device database, are both being integrated into VisionFM +HEALTHCARE, aligning inventory control with device safety alerts.

"Incorporating ECRI Institute's device and manufacturer codes not only helped automate the response to alerts, it substantially improved our equipment inventory and preventative maintenance scheduling for biomedical devices," says Chris Dodds, President of Vision Facilities Management Ltd.

The interface of ECRI Institute's Alerts Tracker™, a Web-based, automated hazard and recall alert management system and VisionFM +HEALTHCARE simplifies the process of effectively responding to alerts. The ECRI Integration makes it easier for users to determine whether equipment involved in a hazard and recall alert is currently in their inventory, and also stores the status of work orders issued in VisionFM +HEALTHCARE in the user's Alerts Tracker database at ECRI Institute.

"With the new interface in place, hospitals can provide a more effective response to patient safety alerts and recalls, reducing hospital risk and improving patient safety," says James P. Keller Jr., Vice President, Health Technology Evaluation and Safety, ECRI Institute.

ECRI Institute offers similar real-time Web services to all vendors of computerized maintenance management services.