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As a way to bolster safety and reduce the likelihood of medication errors or adverse drug events, BWH recently deployed smart infusion pump technology on a wireless network.
“This is an important effort in ensuring the safest possible care for our patients, as well as improving efficiency for staff,” said Michael Fraai, director of the BWH Biomedical Engineering Department, which partnered with Nursing, Pharmacy and IS in the implementation of the wireless network.
A smart pump is a medical device that calculates dose and delivery rates for patients’ intravenous medications, fluids and nutrients to be within the hospital’s approved range. BWH originally adopted smart pumps about 10 years ago. Now that the pumps are operating on a wireless network, the next step in the BWH patient safety vision is to have the pumps associated with a specific patient. This way, information will be wirelessly transmitted from eMAR to the pump so the nurse can verify data and program the pump. This has the potential to dramatically minimize pump programming errors.
In addition, medication administration data from the pump can be wirelessly fed back into the patient care documentation systems, including eMAR and Pharmacy.
The smart pump software has a clinical guidance system, or drug library, that offers clinicians information on hospital-established best practices and alerts them to potential or actual administration errors.
As new medications come into the BWH drug formulary and others are deleted, the drug library is updated to maintain the most accurate information. Previously, the drug library had to be updated manually, one pump at a time—a labor-intensive process that could take weeks.
“It was very difficult to make changes to the drug library with our prior process because the pumps either had to be physically touched or updated one at a time. This is especially hard when the pump is in use,” said Bill Churchill, MS, RPh, chief of BWH Pharmacy Services. “Now, with the wireless network, we are much closer to where we want to be, which is as close to real time updates as we can get.”
That’s especially important for patient safety.
“A nurse is able to see if there has been a drug update or shortage much faster,” said Anne Bane, MS, RN, nursing director in the BWH Center for Nursing Excellence. “It is more user-friendly for the nurse and safer for patients.”
The process of collecting and analyzing data from the smart pumps has improved since smart pump deployment on the wireless network. Data from the pumps can be accessed more frequently and analyzed to improve processes and quality of care. Previously, pump data was analyzed only when preventative maintenance or repairs were done on the pumps.
“We can be more data driven now,” said Fraai. “We can look at utilization, alarm fatigue, improvements in drug library parameters and intervene quicker to improve care for our patients and increase efficiency for staff.”