09 Dec GE Healthcare, MERS announce joint venture on medical event reporting
Nashville, Tenn. – GE Healthcare and MERS International, a developer of medical event reporting systems, have announced a joint venture to develop software that is designed to improve hospital patient safety with more disciplined process improvement.
The new system, known as the Medical Event Reporting System, or MERS, will be deployed by GE Healthcare specialists to drive process and cultural changes that could help to prevent adverse medical events.
MERS was launched this week at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 20th annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care in Nashville.
The MERS software, developed at the International Center for Health Outcomes and Innovation Research at Columbia University, employs web-based event reporting. It is designed to help hospital staff record, investigate, analyze, classify, and find the causes of actual and near miss events such as falls, medication errors, and ventilator-associated pneumonias.
“The capture and analysis of near-miss and no-harm events makes patient safety event reporting more proactive than reactive,” stated Harold S. Kaplan, M.D., professor of clinical pathology at Columbia University Medical Center.
Jeff Terry, general manager for clinical excellence for GE Healthcare, said the joint venture would enable hospitals to move from monitoring and reporting adverse events to making process changes that will prevent them.
MERS users include large urban academic medical centers, community hospitals, pediatric and psychiatric facilities, and ambulatory clinics.