PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA - Anticipating the release of final regulations for the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005, ECRI Institute, a nonprofit organization that researches best approaches to improving patient care, will preview its new Patient Safety Organization (PSO) services at the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM) annual conference, October 2 to 5, 2008.

ECRI Institute, with 40 years of experience operating healthcare problem reporting systems and safety initiatives, will offer PSO membership programs, as well as support for other PSOs. PSO services are based on applied research, interactive tools, a learning network, and a reporting platform powered by rL Solutions. To enable healthcare providers to learn from near misses and adverse events, and to improve patient care, the PSO provides incident report collection and analysis; culture-of-safety recommendations; best practices library, advisories and publications; continuing medical education; and ready-to-use toolkits.

"Driving change is the focus of our PSO," says Jeffrey C. Lerner, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer, ECRI Institute. "Change means improved patient safety--even the reimbursement system now recognizes this, but improved care is the true positive return on investment from participation."
The reporting platform is powered by rL Solutions, a leading software company with deep experience in adverse event reporting, whose systems are used by more than 500 healthcare clients, including some of the largest and most forward thinking healthcare organizations in the United States. The platform will provide a secure way for ECRI Institute's PSO to accept data from providers using any electronic system, as well as to provide an intuitive interface for manual entry.

"Improving the safety of healthcare through software is the core focus of our organization," says Sanjay Malaviya, President and Chief Executive Officer of rL Solutions. "Working with ECRI Institute to affect positive change on this scale is a tremendous opportunity."

ECRI Institute's analytics team, with experience handling more than 1 million adverse event reports, understands not just what reports say, but also want they don't say. "We conduct research on best practices and the evidence behind solutions; we examine organizational dynamics and the care processes behind the event reports," says John R. Clarke, M.D., Clinical Director, Patient Safety and Quality, ECRI Institute. "As a result, we identify causes and contributing factors that are sometimes not apparent to the reporters themselves."

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