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Mobile computing wizards, brandishing their BlackBerries and wielding their iPhones, probably would wirelessly "Google" the term on the spot and see the correct answer: Emergency Care Research Institute.

Founded nine years prior to Healthcare Purchasing News’ launch by medical device inventor and entrepreneur Joel Nobel, M.D., as a research organization in emergency medicine, resuscitation and related biomedical engineering, ECRI quickly positioned itself as the healthcare industry’s highly regarded "Consumer Reports." Nearly four decades ago, the Plymouth Meeting, PA-based Institute evaluated 18 brands of manually operated resuscitators, finding nine of them to be ineffective. Within a few years, the acronym ECRI became a well-accepted, well-recognized brand name as the organization expanded its reach beyond emergency care.

This year, ECRI rebranded itself again, retaining the popular acronym and hitching Institute to the end of it, hearkening back to its roots as a research organization but also re-emphasizing its broader foundation. HPN Senior Editor Rick Dana Barlow met with Ron Rothman, ECRI Institute’s vice president of strategic planning and business development, to gain more perspective on the organization’s new rubric and the reasons behind it.

Revealing the word ‘Institute,’ historically, an important part of our name, is a key step for us. Emphasizing a full name, rather than a four-letter acronym, provides our constituencies a broader sense of who we are and what we do. And we believe the tag line ‘The Discipline of Science. The Integrity of Independence.’ better reflects the values we bring to the users of our research, information and advice.

We found that our members and clients tended to know us in only one area. I can’t count the number of times we heard ‘I didn’t know you did that!’ For example, in addition to medical device evaluations (which is where we started almost 40 years ago), we provide extensive services in patient safety, risk management, technology assessment, and technology planning. And our constituency has expanded from primarily hospitals to include public and private payers, government agencies, continuing care organizations, physicians and insurers.

Let me focus on several areas. First, the depth of our research resources. We are unique in the industry with our dedicated device research laboratories staffed by engineers, scientists and physicists, and as
an Evidence-based Practice Center (as designated by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) staffed by doctoral level scientists, physicians, nurses and epidemiologists. This means the information we provide hospitals is more than just opinion surveys, although we do these as well, but is scientific, evidenced-based information hospitals can rely on.

The second area is the scope of our work. Hospital decisions are complex – involving many considerations including technology assessment and planning, patient safety, acquisition, use, clinical efficacy and cost effectiveness. ECRI Institute’s services and expertise span this decision-making continuum. This means we can integrate issues across a range of hospital processes and support their complexity.

Finally, as a nonprofit organization, we are fully committed to improving healthcare quality and patient safety without the burden of enriching shareholders.

Whether you are a healthcare provider or payer, decisions regarding drugs, devices, procedures or processes affect your healthcare organization’s viability and performance, and profoundly affect the lives of the patients you serve. ECRI Institute is dedicated to bringing the discipline of applied scientific research to discover which approaches are best. Our uncompromising independence and avoidance of conflicts of interest allows us to provide the unbiased information so important when lives are at stake.

Primarily from three sources. First, we have thousands of members and subscribers whose fees fund our research and allow us to share information and advice. Second, we contract with government agencies to develop and maintain programs. Examples include the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Reporting System and the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s National Guideline Clearinghouse, which, by the way, receives 12 million Web site visits a year. The third funding source includes a suite of expert resources, including consulting services, educational services and specialized resources, such as helping hospitals align capital investments with their strategic technology needs, procure the safest, most cost-effective technology, or assess patient safety. However, we refrain from consulting projects for, nor accept advertising from, device manufacturers or pharmaceutical companies. We are committed to maintaining our independence and to providing unbiased information.

It is important to emphasize that we believe strongly in information transparency, as it is a positive for all healthcare stakeholders to have access to the same information. Therefore, we do allow device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies to purchase off-the-shelf publications and some standard membership information. But, as mentioned, our strong conflict of interest rules prevent us from engaging in consulting projects with device manufacturers or pharmaceutical companies. These rules are in place to ensure we maintain an unbiased approach to all projects. We have carefully developed an environment and working conditions that maximize objectivity, productivity, and integrity of process.

Our members and subscribers value unbiased information. Above all else we will stick to our conflict of interest policies, to maintain their trust. And it’s not just ECRI Institute itself that won’t accept manufacturer funding. Our employees can’t own stock in device manufacturers or pharmaceutical companies and every year we examine each employees’ federal tax return after it is filed to verify this.

Instead of relying on a single research project, ECRI Institute’s doctoral-level life scientists, epidemiologists, bio statisticians, engineers, clinicians and other analytic staff take the full body of research on a particular subject, review each study using algorithms to select only the true scientific studies, and then combine the data into a meta analysis, also called a systematic review. The idea is that the Meta analysis provides a more powerful result than a single study.

Some can. We do contract with a select set of GPOs who make available our services to provider members.

We face the same challenges that providers and patients face, including an accelerating pace of technology development. For many providers, it is a challenge to track developments and to determine which are truly new and which are simply variations on existing technologies. To meet these challenges and help keep our members and subscribers informed so they can plan effectively, we have created forecasting tools to identify, track, and evaluate technologies through the development continuum. We are also challenged by the convergence of medical devices with IT and have continuously updated our competencies to keep pace.

Patient safety is one of today’s greatest healthcare challenges and it has been a particularly prominent growth area for us as we find new ways to help providers. Forty years ago we focused on medical device safety – so we are one of the original patient safety organizations. Now, under contract with the award-winning Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority, we collect and analyze over 160,000 near-miss and adverse event reports and recommend patient safety improvements.