ECRI Institute


ECRI is an independent nonprofit organization improving the safety, quality, and cost-effectiveness of care across all healthcare settings worldwide.

History

In the early 1960s, Joel J. Nobel, a surgeon and inventor, founded the institute after a four-year-old boy died in his arms when a defibrillator failed to work. He used the institute to focus his energies on improving cardiopulmonary resuscitation technology, design, and deployment.
Among Nobel's most important inventions was the MAX Cart, a mobile resuscitation system designed for rapid medical response to patients experiencing cardiopulmonary emergencies. Designed and patented in 1965 during Nobel's residency at Pennsylvania Hospital, the cart carries instruments for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and other medical supplies while functioning as a support litter. A prototype of the MAX medical emergency crash cart is in the permanent collection of the Medicine and Science Division of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History as part of its collection of historically significant cardiology and emergency-medicine objects. In 1966, Life profiled the invention in a feature called "MAX, the Lifesaver."
ECRI began comparative evaluations of medical device brands and models in 1971. Since its designation as an Evidence-based Practice Center with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in 1997, it has undertaken systematic reviews of clinical procedures using meta-analysis for the Medicare program, other federal and state agencies, and clinical specialty organizations. To prevent conflicts of interest, the institute has strict rules prohibiting any acceptance of gifts, grants, or contracts from the medical device or pharmaceutical industries.
In 2001, Dr. Jeffrey C. Lerner became ECRI Institute's second President and Chief Executive Officer. In 2018, Dr. Marcus Schabacker became ECRI's third President and Chief Executive Officer.
ECRI is an international organization with offices in the United States, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, and Malaysia. ECRI's headquarters is located in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania on a 24-acre research campus that features a 120,000-square-foot facility with offices, instrumented laboratories, and a medical library. ECRI has nearly 450 full-time employees whose interdisciplinary backgrounds include medicine, nursing, epidemiology, biomedical science, research methodology, social science, clinical engineering, physics, health law, healthcare management, patient safety and risk management, information technology, medical informatics, clinical writing and editing, and many other areas.
The organization serves over 5,000 healthcare organizations worldwide, including hospitals, health systems, public and private payers, U.S. federal and state government agencies, ministries of health, voluntary sector organizations, associations, and accrediting agencies. With these groups, ECRI Institute shares its experience in patient safety improvement, comparative effectiveness, risk and quality management, evidence-based practice, healthcare processes, devices, procedures, and drug technology.
Effective January 2, 2020, Institute for Safe Medication Practices is an ECRI affiliate. Under the affiliation agreement, ISMP operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of ECRI
On March 8, 2020, ECRI

Designations

ECRI Patient Safety Organization is listed as a federal patient safety organization by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005.
ECRI entered into a licensing agreement to adapt the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Reporting System, to meet Pennsylvania-specific reporting requirements. The resulting PA-PSRS system is fully owned by the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority. The Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority board voted unanimously to accept the proposal to fund the ECRI Institute contract through June 2019.
ECRI, designated an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Evidence-based Practice Center with Penn Medicine, conducts research reviews for the Effective Health Care Program.

Services

ECRI provides healthcare information, research, publishing, education and consultation services including:
The organization was the sole prime contractor for developing and maintaining AHRQ's National Guideline Clearinghouse, a database of clinical practice guidelines, since its inception in 1998 and the National Quality Measures Clearinghouse,, a database of evidence-based healthcare quality measures, since its inception in 2001. Both medical informatics tools supported users' efforts to integrate evidence-based practices into healthcare decisions. Both contracts ended in July 2018 due to the lack of federal funding through AHRQ to continue their operation. In November 2018, the ECRI Guidelines Trust was created in response to the defunding of the National Guideline Clearinghouse by the federal government.
ECRI Institute created and maintains the Universal Medical Device Nomenclature System.

Education

ECRI's educational resources include patient safety and risk management continuing medical education /continuing education unit courses and an online program. The organization is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education.
For 24 years, ECRI organized an annual health policy conference delineating perspectives of stakeholders throughout the healthcare community in addressing broad issues about the science, evaluation of evidence, and the use of medical technology, pharmaceuticals, legal substances, procedures, cancer care delivery, complex patients, and health services.

Free resources