Is your AI tool making mistakes you don't know about?

ECRI — the independent nonprofit that's tracked medical device safety issues for decades — just expanded its confidential Problem Reporting Network to cover AI errors, malfunctions, and near misses in patient care. That now includes ambient scribes, EHR-embedded clinical decision support, and patient-facing chatbots.

The number that stood out: in ECRI's survey of 124 health leaders, 35% said they didn't even know whether an AI error had occurred in their own organization. Not "no errors" — didn't know.

A few things worth flagging for virtual care specifically:

• Near misses count now, not just harm. Something like fabricated medication info caught before a note gets signed is reportable — which means the data captures the close calls, not just the failures that reached a patient.
• Telehealth has its own failure modes. ECRI specifically calls out ambient scribes misattributing who's speaking on a virtual visit — patient vs. family member on the call — as an error pattern worth watching.
• It's vendor-neutral. Unlike reporting straight to the vendor who built the tool, this centralizes patterns across the industry, so problems that look like one-off glitches can get caught as trends.

If you're using ambient documentation, AI scribes, or any patient-facing AI in your practice, three questions worth asking this week: who on your team is actually responsible for reporting an AI error if one happens? Does your incident policy even mention near misses? And what does your vendor's own error-reporting process look like?

Want to walk through what this means for your practice's AI tools?

​Book a quick call with me and we'll go through it together.

Sources:

• ​ECRI Expands Its Problem Reporting Network to Clinical AI Errors — Telehealth.org​

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Thanks for reading!

-Dan

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