California Hospital Patient Safety Organization Selects ECRI Institute PSO For Patient Safety Services

Program designed to improve safety and quality in California hospitals

PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa., Feb. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization announces an agreement to provide patient safety services to the California Hospital Patient Safety Organization (CHPSO). ECRI Institute PSO will support CHPSO with a patient safety data collection and reporting system and by analyzing adverse events and other information from participating hospitals and health systems.

The California Hospital Patient Safety Organization is one of the largest organizations dedicated to patient safety in the nation. More than half of all California hospitals have joined in this quest to eliminate preventable patient harm.

"Our new partnership with ECRI Institute will help expedite patient safety data collection and analysis," says Rory Jaffe, M.D., executive director of CHPSO. "Members will benefit from ECRI's extensive experience with health care reporting systems and safety initiatives, allowing California hospitals to accelerate learning from near misses and adverse events."

"We commend the California Hospital Patient Safety Organization for taking a strong leadership role in improving patient safety through the sharing of data. We look forward to providing the analyses and data to help them learn from and reduce adverse events," says Ronni Solomon, JD, executive vice president and general counsel, ECRI Institute.

The ECRI Institute Patient Safety analytics team, with experience handling more than 1.5 million adverse event reports, comprises an interdisciplinary staff of physicians, nurses, biomedical engineers, and instructional designers; quality, legal, and risk management professionals; individuals with safety, education, science, and engineering backgrounds; statisticians and data analysts, and information technology experts. In addition to the internal program team, the external advisory group includes physicians, nurses, lawyers, and senior executives at hospitals and health care associations.