ECRI Institute Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

The DreamStation CPAP is among the devices involved in Philips’ respiratory devices recall. [Image courtesy of Philips]

Philips’ CPAP recall has placed a spotlight on serious communication gaps involving home-use medical devices.

Nonprofit safety organization ECRI recently released its annual Top 10 Health Technology Hazards report. The report said the No. 1 health technology safety issue for 2023 involves communications over medical devices in the home.

The trend of more healthcare services moving to the home is accelerating, according to ECRI. Officials at the group worry that home patients may not receive safety notices that warn of dangerous problems with the medical devices they are using.

ECRI claims that medical device manufacturers seldom directly communicate with people using their devices at home. Worse, healthcare providers may not proactively contact patients about recalls.…

(Image by Антон Дмитриев on Unsplash)

Patient safety organization ECRI comes out with its list of health technology hazards every year, and it often contains the same issues. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed much of that.

The nonprofit organization is focusing this year on the need to move from trying to cope during an emergency to building stronger and more resilient processes, using the innovations developed during the pandemic and the lessons learned along the way.

ECRI engineers, scientists, clinicians and other patient safety analysts nominate topics for the list based on their own expertise and insight gained through:

Investigating incidents. Testing medical devices in the ECRI lab. Observing operations and assessing hospital practices. Reviewing the literature. Speaking with clinicians, clinical engineers, technology managers, purchasing staff, health systems administrators, and device suppliers.

The ECRI staff also considers the thousands of h…

ECRI Institute

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