Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations: 2016

In selecting this year's list of top patient safety concerns, ECRI Institute relied on an array of sources, reflecting both quantitative data on events and concerns and the judgment of many experts at the forefront of patient safety. As a result, ECRI Institute's list underscores that "these are real things that are happening," says Catherine Pusey, RN, MBA, associate director, ECRI Institute PSO. "They're happening at a serious level, our members are asking questions around these topics, and we're seeing them in many different manifestations."

The process synthesized data from these varied sources:

But this is not an exercise in simple tabulation. "The list is not meant to be a formulaic algorithm that necessarily picks out the things that are most frequent and most severe," says Bill Marella, MBA, MMI, executive director, PSO operations and analytics, noting that most organizations already know what their high-frequency, high-severity challenges are. Instead, he says, "We're trying to pick out the things that are relatively novel or that are not necessarily new but are manifesting themselves in a new way because of changes in the healthcare system."

Three of the items on this year's list—those relating to health information technology (IT), endoscope cleaning, and monitoring of patients on opioids—are also on ECRI Institute's 2016 list of top 10 health technology hazards. According to Rob Schluth, lead project manager for the top health technology hazards and senior project officer with ECRI Institute's Health Devices group, these three items represent "topics where there's a clear intersection between technology management and clinical practice," underscoring "the need for cooperation across disciplines."

ECRI Institute also publishes an annual watch list, the Top 10 technology and infrastructure issues that a hospital C-suite should carefully examine. The list draws on ECRI Institute's decades of experience evaluating the safety, effectiveness, and cost-efficiency of health technologies.

Broadly, ECRI Institute's Top 10 lists serve to remind healthcare organizations that evaluation of patient safety concerns, health technology hazards, and emerging technology issues should be an ongoing process. As Pusey says, a corollary goal of this report is to "heighten awareness that...