Four advocacy organizations sent a letter March 14 to Don Rucker MD at the HHS Office of the National Coordinator https://www.healthit.gov and to Gopal Khanna, Director for AHRQ https://www.ahrq.gov, to establish a national health IT organization to be called the “National Health IT Safety Collaborative”.
The organizations include the ECRI Institute, Alliance for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (AQIPS), Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), and The Pew Charitable Trusts. The letter was signed by Ronni Solomon Executive VP and General Counsel ECRI Institute, Peggy Binzer, Executive AQIPS, Janet Marchibroda, Director, Health Innovation Initiative BPC, and Josh Rising, Director, Health Care Programs for The Pew Charitable Trusts.
According to the letter, the Collaborative would:
- Engage private and public sector partners to lead efforts to collaboratively identify, examine, address, and measure progress on nationally-relevant safety concerns
- Advance the principle of shared responsibility among all stakeholders by securing participation from clinicians, hospitals, other providers, health IT developers, Patient Safety Organizations (PSO), safety experts, patient representatives, and other interested organizations
- Aggregate data from multiple sources to identify and prioritize emerging risks for action and provide the rationale for safety improvements
- Serve as a clearinghouse for health IT safety tools, solutions, best practices, and resources
To achieve success, as expressed in the letter, the individual advocacy organizations have plans to:
- ECRI Institute https://www.ecri.org –Will build upon their existing ‘Partnership for Health IT Safety to establish the National Health IT Safety Collaborative
- AQIPS www.allianceforqualityimprovement.org —Will coordinate the collection of data for the collaborative, hold several stakeholder HIT safety summits, serve on governmental policy task forces, and develop tool kits to improve patient care, safety, and outcomes
- BPC https://bipartisanpolicy.org –Will provide technical assistance and support to the launch of the national collaborative. BPC recently released two sets of consensus recommendations over the last five years which calls for coordinated national leadership to set health IT safety priorities
- Pew Charitable Trusts www.pewtrusts.org— Will continue to work with EHR developers, healthcare providers, and other stakeholders on ways to improve health IT safety. Pew recently released a report on ways to reduce opportunities for patient harm.
The four organizations plan to engage private and public sector partners in the National Health IT Safety Collaborative in the coming months. If organizations want to join, go to http://hitsafety.org or email hit@ecri.org.