ECRI Releases HIT Hazards List
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
Inadequate device cleaning was the number one technology hazard in ECRI’s latest list of risks.
Number one on ECRI’s list of 2016 Technology Hazards is failure to clean and disinfect clinical instruments, including endoscopes. This took over first place from alarm hazards, which was the number one safety concern for four years.
“The failure to adequately reprocess contaminated instruments — that is, to clean and disinfect or sterilize them — before using them on subsequent patients can lead to the spread of deadly pathogens,” writes the report’s author. “A key aspect of effective reprocessing is cleaning biologic debris and other foreign material from instruments before the disinfection or sterilization step. If this precleaning is not carried out effectively, the disinfection or sterilization step may not be effective.”
Fierce Health IT reports other hazards included failure to monitor post-operative patients for opioid-induced respiratory depression, inadequate surveillance of monitored patients in a telemetry setting, insufficient training for technologies in operating rooms, and misuse of USB ports, which can make medical devices malfunction.
“With all of the issues that hospital leaders are dealing with, technology safety can often be overlooked,” says Anthony Montagnolo, chief operating officer, ECRI Institute. “Based on our experience with independent medical device testing in our laboratory, accident investigations, and reported events, we're very aware of serious safety problems that occur.”
According to iHealth Beat, the report also included three health IT-related hazards that hospitals should look out for in 2016:
- missed alarms, including alarm fatigue, which ranked second
- failure to observe patients being monitored in a telemetry setting, which ranked fourth
- poor alignment between health IT and provider workflow, which ranked sixth