Smart Healthcare Safety from ECRI

Medical emergencies evoke images of the hospital emergency department or emergency medical personnel responding in the community. But medical emergencies can occur anywhere, including in office and clinic settings—and sometimes those emergencies involve medications. In this episode, Dr. Kelley Shultz describes challenges in responding to emergencies in the office setting and steps they can take to...

In this episode, we talk about how healthcare practitioners give medicine through a vein, and a way that healthcare organizations can make it safer for patients. We’ll discuss why ready-to-administer medications are safer, and what patients, caregivers, and healthcare workers should know. You can find ISMP’s Safe Practice Guidelines for Adult IV Push Medications at https://home.ecri.org/blogs/ismp...

As the school year is winding down, children across the nation are getting ready to attend summer camps. Many of them will need prescription and over-the-counter medications while they’re at camp, away from their parents and primary care providers. If camps aren’t ready to manage the responsibilities of storing and managing those meds, their campers could be at risk. In this episode, Randi Trope,...

The idea of the “five rights” for medication safety has been taught in nursing school since at least World War II, used as a memory tool that nurses should rely on to administer medications safely. Even though no one can identify where the five rights came from, the idea is embedded in medication safety programs and appears frequently in error reports submitted to ECRI and the ISMP Patient Safety...

In this episode, Tim Gibson, Senior Manager, Functional Equivalents, and Andy Poole, Associate Director, Strategy and Innovation, ECRI, describe strategies for enhancing the supply management process in non-acute organizations like nursing homes, ambulatory surgery centers, and physician practices. They describe the importance of building a robust data set and dedicating real staff time to this ca...

In the latest episode of our podcast, we speak to Karen Garvey, Vice President, Safety and Clinical Risk Management, and J.D. Buchert, Workplace Safety Manager, Parkland Health (Dallas, Texas). They describe their data-driven approach to identifying and combatting workplace violence, including the importance of keeping frontline staff involved in and aware of those efforts.

In this episode, we talk with nurse leaders from Allegheny Health Network (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) about their innovative blended staffing model that encourages LPNs to return to acute care, along with other programs to help bolster staffing, like incentivizing nurses who have left the workforce to return to practice.

Providing equitable care for a diverse population requires providers to meet patients where they are—including if they are experiencing homelessness. In this episode, Dr. Jose Ramos, of Pomona Valley Health Centers, describes his team’s outreach efforts to homeless individuals, how those efforts were affected by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and strategies for implementing similar programs e...

In this episode, our guest, Emily Transue, MD, MHA, FACP, Medical Director for the Washington State Health Care Authority (HCA), discusses how shared decision-making can be more than a tool to engage patients in their care, and can also help in the fight against care inequities and disparities.

In this episode, we talk with our guest, Tom McCormick, Vice President, Patient Accounting, at Penn Medicine, about adjusting staffing patterns in the patient accounting department during the COVID-19 pandemic. He shares his perspective on how staff roles changed, how the shift to remote work had expected and unexpected effects, and how all of it tied back to providing for patient and staff safety...

In this episode, our guests discuss their data-driven approach to identify and combat disparities and realize their vision of creating a Dallas County with equitable, accessible healthcare for all. Our first guest, Brett Moran, MD, is from Parkland Health & Hospital System, one of the country’s largest and most progressive safety-net hospitals. Our second guest, Steve Miff, PhD, is from Parkla...

In this episode, we're taking another look at shortages in the nursing workforce. Healthcare has faced workforce shortages in the past, and even before the COVID-19 pandemic made things even worse. The American Nurses Association and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast the retirement of more than half a million registered nurses by the end of 2022. Our guests are from the M. Louise Fitzpa...

In this episode, we're talking about ECRI’s number one Top 10 concern for 2022: staffing shortages and the potential dangers to both the patients and the staff. Prior to 2021, there was a growing shortage of both clinical and non-clinical staff, but the problem has grown exponentially. Our guest is Ernest Grant, PhD, RN, FAAN, the 36th President of the American Nurses Association (ANA).

In this episode, we’re talking to our guest from Valleywise Health's Refugee Women's Health Clinic, serving more than 9,000 refugees since 2008 from over 60 countries and is located in the greater Phoenix, Arizona area; specifically, Maricopa County. The Refugee Women's Health Clinic has a long-established infrastructure of community partnership, engagement, and shared community leadership that th...

In this episode, we're talking about wound care biologics—products used to treat all sorts of acute and chronic wounds in hospitals and other care settings. ECRI experts will review what wound care biologics are and some of the challenges that providers face in terms of purchasing and inventory management. Our guests will also discuss strategies to ensure that the right products are available to c...

This episode is part of a series regarding the ECRI and the ISMP Patient Safety Organization's (PSO) annual Deep Dive report. The 2021 Deep Dive report focuses on issues of racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare. Research has repeatedly confirmed that members of racial and ethnic minority groups are more likely to experience disparities in care, including having an increased risk of being uni...

This episode is part of a series regarding the ECRI and the ISMP Patient Safety Organization's (PSO) annual Deep Dive report. The 2021 Deep Dive report focuses on issues of racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare. Research has repeatedly confirmed that members of racial and ethnic minority groups are more likely to experience disparities in care, including having an increased risk of being uni...

This episode is part of a series regarding the ECRI and the ISMP Patient Safety Organization's (PSO) annual Deep Dive report. The 2021 Deep Dive report focuses on issues of racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare. Research has repeatedly confirmed that members of racial and ethnic minority groups are more likely to experience disparities in care, including having an increased risk of being uni...

Today, more than a year into the COVID pandemic, we're talking about the process of disaster recovery. While much has been written over the past year about the ways in which the national and global healthcare systems prepared (or could have prepared) for the pandemic, and should prepare for the next one, not as much attention has been paid to how individual providers and organizations will recover...

With access to COVID-19 vaccines now more widespread throughout the United States, but still only available under emergency use authorization, employers are wrestling with questions about whether to mandate that their staff received the vaccine. Perhaps, no industry has a more fraught decisions than Aging Services. There remains a significant gap between vaccination rates among staff and residents...

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services formally designated ECRI as a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) in 2008. Since then, our PSO has studied nearly 4 million adverse events and near misses from over 1,400 healthcare providers nationwide across acute, ambulatory, and aging services. In this episode, we'll explore what it means to be and participate in a PSO and the evidence for how par...

Today, we're talking about ECRI's 2021 list of the Top 10 Health Technology Hazards. This report is intended to identify potential sources of danger that we believe warrant the greatest attention for the coming year and offer practical recommendations for reducing the risks. The 2021 list features all new topics. Several focus on hazards that have developed in today’s environment of unprecedented...

In this episode around COVID-19 vaccines, we’ll discuss topics like why two shots are needed with the currently authorized vaccines, concerns about allergies and contraindications, new mutations, and more.

Nursing homes have recently been assessed millions of dollars in citations for failing to have effective respiratory protection programs in place to protect staff and residents from COVID-19. Many of these violations are related to the failure to develop a written program, as well as for not providing medical evaluations, training, and fit testing for N95 masks.

This podcast is part of ECRI's ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In today’s episode, Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD, President and CEO of ECRI, discusses our position paper on the fast-tracked development of COVID-19 vaccines . During recent FDA public hearings and within the paper, ECRI warns that rushing to deploy vaccines before all the data has been collected and evaluated could lead to i...