The Michigan Health and Hospital Association has signed a three-year contract with the ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization to provide its members with patient safety data collection and analysis.
The MHA Patient Safety Organization is a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve patient safety and quality for all Michigan residents. It collaborates with providers to implement evidence-based best practices that will reduce medical errors and improve the quality of healthcare delivery.
ECRI will provide "back office" support to the MHA PSO through a patient safety data collection and reporting system and by analyzing adverse events and other information from participating hospitals. The reporting platform will be powered by rL Solutions, a Toronto - based software company.
"Michigan hospitals are once again taking proactive actions to identify medical errors and implement healthcare quality improvement protocols that will prevent the recurrence of errors and ultimately improve patient safety," said MHA President Spencer Johnson. "Without question, Michigan hospitals are leading the nation in promoting voluntary and comprehensive measures to make healthcare safer."
ECRI will also provide MHA with state and national aggregate data, quarterly patient safety advisories, lessons learned from root-cause analyses, help in redesign of systems and processes, and evidence/literature review for best practices/solutions.
MHA PSO will initiate the data collection process with member educational and training forums beginning this month.
"We commend MHA's leadership in quickly establishing a program to take advantage of the newly implemented federal Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 to improve patient safety throughout their state," says Ronni Solomon, executive vice president and general counsel, ECRI Institute.
"ECRI Institute's four decades of patient safety experience, plus success in implementing the first state-wide error reporting system for Pennsylvania, makes ECRI Institute PSO ideally suited to support the MHA PSO and other PSOs, such as states, hospital associations, hospital systems, regional patient safety collaboratives, and medical societies," said Solomon.
