Sometimes it can feel like every time you turn around a new device recall or alert is being announced. Whether it comes from the FDA, manufacturers or other organizations — it can be a challenge for hospitals to keep track of the alerts that are relevant to them and their equipment.

For that reason, ECRI Institute has launched a new feature for its existing Alerts Tracker automated recall management solution called Automatch for Equipment, which identifies equipment models and supplies within a facility that have been alerted or recalled.

ECRI developed Automatch because of the large amount of safety alerts related to medical equipment, which can reach 20 to 25 per week, and the unreliability of inventory databases.

"As result of these factors, it is difficult for hospitals and health systems to reliably identify all alerts that affect them and to reliably identify all affected devices throughout the hospital," Eric Sacks, director of health care product alerts at ECRI, told HCB News. "Automatch streamlines the process and makes it much more reliable and complete.”

Clinical engineers typically have to manually search through the inventory database to find the affected equipment. Automatch generates a list of affected assets and automatically distributes it to every potentially affected department.

Alerts Tracker, the system on which Automatch functions, is ECRI's solution for electronically distributing safety information about medical devices, blood products, food products and pharmaceuticals to the appropriate staff member.

“By notifying you daily of those alerts that have direct impact to your inventory, you’re able to process them a lot quicker, thereby making your patients safer,” Kate O’Rourke, director of clinical management services at ECRI, said in a video.

Automatch also cleans the data in the facility’s inventory by matching it to ECRI’s standardized database of medical devices, which eliminates duplications and disparities. The Alerts Tracker team provides ongoing support with personalized implementation, expert reporting tools and help with developing policies and practices.

Since ECRI investigates accidents in hospitals, it puts them in a unique position to develop recommendations and publish hazard reports that other organizations don’t cover, according to Sacks.

The feature will debut at the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation 2016 Conference and Expo in Tampa, Florida from June 3 to 6. ECRI will be performing demonstrations at booth #622 in the exhibit hall.

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