How We Help
Improve Safety
Preventing harm is what we are here for.
Safety Is at the Core of Everything We Do
Preventable harm in healthcare remains one of the most urgent, persistent challenges in the industry. Despite decades of effort, the data tells a hard truth: the systems clinicians work within — not the people — are often the source of failure.
Building Safer Systems for Better Care
ECRI was founded with a clear purpose: to make healthcare safer. We help healthcare organizations understand where their systems break down, build the structures and culture to prevent harm before it occurs, and sustain improvement over time. Our approach is grounded in advanced safety science, free from vendor influence, and backed by the accumulated expertise of more than five decades of patient safety research and practice.
1 in 4
inpatient admissions involve an adverse event
22.7%
of those events are preventable
$20 Billion
annual cost of preventable adverse events in U.S. hospitals
How ECRI Advances Safety
Safety Consulting
Build Safety Into Your System
SafeSystem Solutions is ECRI's integrated consulting practice, bringing together specialized expertise in systems thinking, human-centered design, just culture, medication safety, and infection prevention. Our experts don't prescribe one-size-fits-all solutions — they partner with your teams to understand how your organization works, where the vulnerabilities are, and how to design them out. The goal is a safety system that is effective, reliable, and resilient: one that reduces preventable harm, supports your workforce, and holds up under real-world conditions.
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Patient Safety Organization
Turn Safety Events Into System-Wide Improvement
ECRI’s Patient Safety Organization (PSO) is the largest safety reporting and learning system in North America, serving members across all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Guam. PSO membership provides legal protections for candid safety reporting, expert analysis to uncover system vulnerabilities, and data-driven insights that help organizations prevent harm and drive lasting improvements in patient safety.
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Risk Management
Identify Risk Before It Becomes Liability
ECRI’s Risk Management tools help healthcare organizations identify gaps across high-risk, high-liability areas before they lead to adverse events or costly claims. Our web-based assessments standardize evaluation across care settings, provide actionable recommendations aligned with current standards, and help teams prioritize improvements, monitor progress, and demonstrate measurable risk reduction over time.
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Medication Safety
Stay Ahead of Medication Risk
ECRI’s medication safety memberships, powered by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), provide healthcare professionals with ongoing guidance to reduce medication-related risk. Continuously updated memberships deliver actionable resources, proactive risk assessments, and expert tools tailored to hospitals, health systems, and specialty pharmacies—helping teams identify vulnerabilities, strengthen medication-use processes, and prevent errors before they reach patients.
Explore Just Culture
Safety doesn't happen by accident.
ECRI's work is rooted in a simple conviction: preventable harm should be prevented. For more than 50 years, that conviction has driven how we research, how we advise, and how we partner with healthcare organizations of every size and setting. When you work with ECRI, you're not bringing in a vendor — you're gaining an independent partner whose only interest is a safer system.
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Let's build safer care across your organization.
Let's start zeroing in on exactly how we can help.