FHA and SFHHA announce an agreement with the ECRI Institute for patient safety data collection

Sep 11 2009

The Florida Hospital Association (FHA) and the South Florida Hospital & Healthcare Association (SFHHA) today announce an agreement with the ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization (PSO) to support the Patient Safety Organization of Florida (PSOFlorida) with patient safety data collection and analysis. PSOFlorida, a component organization of the FHA and the SFHHA, was established to focus on improving the quality of care that hospitals in Florida provide to the state's residents and visitors.

"Hospitals have made improving patient care a priority and the development of PSOFlorida is an essential element in measuring and evaluating that improvement," said Bruce Rueben, FHA President. "Past legal efforts to impede improvement in patient care will be reduced by PSOFlorida."

ECRI Institute PSO (www.ecri.org/pso) will support PSOFlorida through a Patient Safety Data Collection and Reporting System and by analyzing adverse events and other information from participating hospitals and providers. The reporting platform is powered by rL Solutions, a leading software company with deep experience in adverse event reporting. The ECRI Institute PSO analytics team has experience handling more than 1 million adverse event reports.

"Improving patient safety and raising levels of quality require hospitals to appropriately identify errors, track their origins, share their results, and implement improvements," said Linda Quick, SFHHA President. "PSOFlorida provides the means and opportunity for Florida hospitals to do all these things."

"We look forward to working with PSOFlorida on new initiatives to improve patient safety throughout the state," says Ronni Solomon, executive vice president and general counsel, ECRI Institute.

ECRI Institute PSO will provide data collection and reporting systems, state aggregation, expert patient safety analysis, culture-of-safety recommendations, and advisories.