The Patient Safety Movement Announced 49 Medical Technology Companies Have Signed the Pledge to Share Data

IRVINE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The Patient Safety Movement Foundation announced today that 49 healthcare technology companies have signed the Patient Safety Movement’s Open Data Pledge, a public pledge to share their data to promote patient safety.

The pledge is designed to foster a marketplace of data analytics to encourage entrepreneurs to develop novel uses of health data that will improve patient safety and reduce preventable deaths. If enough medical technology companies share the data their products are purchased for, it allows engineers and researchers to develop predictive algorithms that notify clinicians and patients of dangerous trends. The pledge does not ask any company to share protected or proprietary data or not follow all the privacy laws. Companies can make their pledge online at http://patientsafetymovement.org/commitments/medical-technology-company-commitments/.

“From 9 companies in 2013 to now, 49 companies have made the pledge to share their data with whomever can use the data to create analytics and algorithms that may detect the ailment of the patient, and predict the patient’s health and direction of health to help caregivers prevent harm before it happens,” said Joe Kiani, Founder of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation. “We thank each and every one of these companies who are leading the way to safer patient care by giving their data. With data sharing, we will hopefully also unlock the mysteries behind cancer and heart disease and help identify therapies that are most likely to work. So what we’ve started here to treat the third leading cause of death – preventable patient harm, may one day even help the first and second causes of death.”

“I lost the love of my life to an information coordination error event that could have and should have been prevented,” said Brent Nibarger. “Had the data sharing pledge happened 5 years sooner, the types of algorithms the Patient Safety Movement speaks about likely would have saved my wife’s life. It’s important to remember that every preventable death statistic represents someone’s wife, husband, father, mother, brother, sister, or child and thus the resulting emotional, financial and family implications of these events reach far, far beyond what the reported numbers reflect. The caliber of companies that have stepped forward to join in this initiative to put patient safety first is incredible and it gives me hope for a safer patient care environment in the future.”

“The Patient Safety Movement was the first organization to connect the dots between data sharing and patient safety and then do something about it,” said Richard A. Packer, CEO of ZOLL. “We signed the pledge in 2013 with a handful of other companies. The movement has come a long way. We look forward to continuing to work closely with the Patient Safety Movement Foundation in eliminating preventable patient deaths.”

Ed Cantwell, Executive Director of the Center for Medical Interoperability, said, “We launched the Center shortly after the first press release from the Patient Safety Movement announcing nine companies had signed the pledge to share data. The Center as a provider-led centralized R&D lab, will drive plug and play interoperability from the point of care to and from enterprise systems. With 49 companies making the pledge and the launch of the Center, we know that we are very close to making patient care safe and effective systematically, in addition to our extraordinary caregivers. We will work with the Patient Safety Movement to make patient data help save patients’ lives by making the Patient Data Superhighway faster and fully interoperable.”

To date, the following 49 companies have made a pledge to share data:

About The Patient Safety Movement Foundation

More than 3,000,000 people worldwide, and 200,000 people in the US die every year in hospitals in ways that could have been prevented. The Patient Safety Movement Foundation was established through the support of the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation, and Competition in Healthcare, to reduce that number of preventable deaths to 0 by 2020 (0X2020) in the US and dramatically worldwide. Improving patient safety will require a collaborative effort from all stakeholders, including patients, healthcare providers, medical technology companies, government, employers, and private payers. The Patient Safety Movement Foundation works with all stakeholders to address the problems and solutions of patient safety. The Foundation also convenes the annual World Patient Safety, Science and Technology summit. The Summit presents specific, actionable solutions to meet patient safety challenges, encouraging medical technology companies to share the data for which their products are purchased, and asking hospitals to make commitments to implement Actionable Patient Safety Solutions. Visit www.patientsafetymovement.org.

Via Business Wire »