ECRI’s annual report detailing the most pressing health technology risks includes home-use of medical devices, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, counterfeit medical products, and more.
Summary: ECRI’s 2025 report names AI-enabled health technologies as the top healthcare hazard, citing risks like bias, false results, and safety concerns, while urging careful integration alongside other critical challenges such as home care support gaps, cybersecurity threats, and medical device safety.
Key Takeaways
- AI Risks in Healthcare: Artificial intelligence tops ECRI’s 2025 hazards list, with concerns about patient safety risks, bias, and false results that can disproportionately affect marginalized communities.
- Broader Technology Hazards: ECRI identifies additional risks, including unmet technology support for home care, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and issues with medical devices and supplies.
- Call for Proactive Measures: ECRI emphasizes the need for healthcare stakeholders to critically evaluate AI integration and adopt strategies to mitigate risks outlined in its Top 10 Health Technology Hazards report.
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Artificial intelligence, now integral to healthcare, leads ECRI’s 2025 list of top health technology risks. While AI promises improved efficiency and outcomes, ECRI warns of significant patient safety risks if not carefully managed. Originally focused on medical imaging, AI now spans diagnostics, documentation, and scheduling. Even unregulated applications in ancillary systems can significantly impact patient care, ECRI emphasizes.
The Downside of AI
“The promise of artificial intelligence’s capabilities must not distract us from its risks or its ability to harm patients and providers,” says Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD, president and CEO of ECRI. “Balancing innovation in AI with privacy and safety will be one of the most difficult, and most defining, endeavors of modern medicine.”
ECRI experts say AI systems can produce false or misleading results, or “hallucinations,” and the quality of their output can vary across different patient populations. AI models can perpetuate any bias built into them, posing significant risks for underrepresented and historically marginalized communities.
“AI is only as good as the data it is given and the guardrails that govern its use,” says Schabacker. “Healthcare stakeholders at all levels must think critically about the integration of AI, as they would with any new technology.”
The Top 10 Health Technology Hazards
Rounding out the list are technology hazards identified in home care and acute care settings, information security applications, and the medical device supply chain. ECRI’s Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2025, in rank order, are:
- Risks with AI-enabled health technologies
- Unmet technology support needs for home care patients
- Vulnerable technology vendors and cybersecurity threats
- Substandard or fraudulent medical devices and supplies
- Fire risk from supplemental oxygen
- Dangerously low default alarm limits on anesthesia units
- Mishandled temporary holds on medication orders
- Poorly managed infusion lines
- Harmful medical adhesive products
- Incomplete investigations of infusion system incidents
The full Top 10 Health Technology Hazards report, accessible to ECRI members, provides detailed steps that organizations and industry can proactively take to reduce risk and improve patient safety. An executive brief version is available for complimentary download at this link: Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2025 Executive Brief.
ECRI will host a live webcast about the top 10 hazards, open to the public, on December 5 at noon ET. A panel of medical device and healthcare safety experts will discuss the hazards’ consequences for patient safety, clinician efficiency, and operational effectiveness, plus strategies for mitigating these risks. Register for the webcast at this link: Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2025.
