NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Southcoast Health announced today that the Southcoast Physician Group (SPG) has joined ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization (PSO) to further enhance quality and safety initiatives in physician offices.

By joining ECRI Institute PSO, SPG has expanded their capacity to conduct patient safety activities, including event reporting, peer review, root cause analysis, and other quality improvement work. The objective is to enhance learning, improve the quality of care provided to patients, and prevent patient harm across not only SPG practice sites, but the entire organization.

The purposes of SPG’s membership in the PSO are to:

• Create a safe harbor for event reporting, analyses, and peer review
• Learn from our near misses and errors to improve care delivery and prevent patient harm
• Support Southcoast Health’s mission to provide safe and high quality care to our patients
• Mitigate risks to patients, providers and the organization

PSOs were created as part of the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 (Patient Safety Act). The Patient Safety Act encourages clinicians and healthcare organizations to voluntarily report quality and patient safety information with PSOs confidentially and without fear of legal discovery. Through this process, PSOs can help healthcare professionals learn from quality and safety events to prevent them from happening in the future. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, administers the PSO program, which certifies and lists PSOs.

PSOs bring several unique advantages that enhance an organization’s patient safety activities. ECRI Institute PSO has experts who collect, analyze, and aggregate clinical data at the local, regional, and national level to develop insights into the underlying causes of patient safety events. They also work with members to develop best practices and protocols that support the practice of evidence-based medicine. Lastly, ECRI Institute PSO shares learnings to accelerate the identification of patient safety trends and the speed with which solutions can be identified and best practices adopted.

For more information abut the ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization, visit www.ecri.org/about/PatientSafetyOrganization.

 About ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization

A component of ECRI Institute, a nonprofit 501(c)(3), the mission of the Patient Safety Organization is to achieve the highest levels of safety and quality in healthcare by collecting and analyzing over 1 million patient safety reports and sharing lessons learned and best practices. The PSO Advisory Board and interdisciplinary team includes experts throughout the industry including: physicians, nurses, biomedical engineers, instructional designers, quality, legal and risk management professionals.

ECRI Institute PSO has been officially listed (effective 11/5/08) by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a federally-listed Patient Safety Organization under the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005.

ECRI Institute has a long history of investigating events and publishing authoritative risk reduction strategies. Our nearly 50 years of experience includes operating healthcare problem reporting systems and safety initiatives. ECRI Institute has developed and operates the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Reporting System, a mandatory error and near-miss reporting program for Pennsylvania hospitals and other healthcare facilities, under contract to the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority. Over 2 million reports have been collected and analyzed.