Smart Healthcare Safety from ECRI

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 uninsured or underinsured, lacking access to care, and experiencing worse health outcomes for treatable and preventable conditions.In this episode, we’re talking to guests from Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, serving Camden, New Jersey, residents to improve the lives of people with complex health and social needs. The Camden Coalition also works to help patients across the country through the Coalition's National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs. We'll talk about how the Coalition's mission is to improve care for people with complex health and social needs by implementing person-centered care programs that address not only illness but strive to overcome social barriers to health and enhance wellbeing.

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 uninsured or underinsured, lacking access to care, and experiencing worse health outcomes for treatable and preventable conditions.In this episode, we’re talking to guests from Cooper University Health Care, serving southern New Jersey and Delaware. We discuss outreach around access to the COVID-19 vaccine, how they've worked to overcome those barriers, and how these efforts fit into larger programs to fight inequities.To learn more about ECRI and the ISMP PSO, or to request a demo, visit https://www.ecri.org/pso.

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 from the past year's trauma. In this episode, our guest reminds us that challenges like these can also be viewed as opportunities—and we'll discuss how healthcare providers can turn that attitude into action.To learn more about ECRI’s response to the pandemic, check out the COVID-19 Resource Center.

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, and older adults remain one of the most vulnerable populations to COVID-19.In today’s episode, we’ll review the current state of COVID vaccinations in Aging Services, talk about strategies for increasing vaccination rates, and discuss some of the unintended consequences of not vaccinating.To learn more about ECRI’s Aging Services Risk Management, or to request a demo, visit https://www.ecri.org/solutions/aging-risk-management/.

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 participation can benefit patient safety, and we'll briefly review some of the legal challenges to PSO protections.

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 stresses and rapid technological changes.

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.