ECRI Institute PSO enters agreement with Tennessee Center to provide patient safety services

ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization (PSO) today announces an agreement to provide patient safety services to the Tennessee Center for Patient Safety established by the Tennessee Hospital Association. ECRI Institute PSO will support the Tennessee Center for Patient Safety with a patient safety data collection and reporting system and by analyzing adverse events and other information from participating hospitals and health systems. This pioneering initiative will improve the quality and safety of healthcare services delivered throughout Tennessee.

"We selected ECRI Institute PSO because of its extensive experience in analyzing patient safety data and development of practical information to help providers improve the process of delivering care," Craig A. Becker, president of the Tennessee Hospital Association.  

The Tennessee Center for Patient Safety PSO will collect, aggregate and analyze serious patient safety events within a protected environment. Member education and training conferences will begin this month.

"Providers will be able to voluntarily share serious adverse event quality and patient safety information, learn from aggregate and facility-specific root cause analyses and best practices, and protect patients from harm through shared learning," stated Tennessee's Becker.  

"We're pleased to see the strong leadership role that the Tennessee Center for Patient Safety is taking in improving patient safety through the sharing of data," says Ronni Solomon, executive vice president and general counsel, ECRI Institute. "We look forward to providing the analyses and data to help them learn from and reduce adverse events."

The ECRI Institute patient safety analytics team, with experience handling more than 1 million adverse event reports, comprises an interdisciplinary patient safety staff of physicians, nurses, biomedical engineers, instructional designers, and quality, legal, and risk management professionals. Their external advisory group includes physicians, lawyers, and senior executives at hospitals and health care associations.

ECRI Institute PSO uses a Web-based patient safety reporting system to capture patient safety data in a standardized manner compatible with the common data formats published by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and National Quality Forum serious reportable events.

ECRI Institute PSO supports numerous state-based PSO programs as well as hospitals, health systems, and other provider organizations nationwide.