Resources

Bainbridge Health's Sean O'Neill, PharmD and Joanne Hatfield, PharmD, BCPS shared data from our vast network of hospitals to review types of good catches detected by smart infusion pumps, trends in good catch data, including medication examples, strategies to enhance patient safety through library build.

Smart infusion pumps in health systems across the United States has become a best practice. 

Although challenges to implementation may exist, bidirectional integration of smart infusion pumps with an electronic health record, also known as interoperability, can offer an additional layer of patient safety.  

Best practice is to implement upper and lower hard limits when developing a smart infusion pump drug library. Healthcare systems report challenges in determining appropriate hard limits, especially for continuously infused medications, due to wide variability in dosing.

By reviewing trends in programming and network benchmarking data, healthcare systems can implement upper hard dose limits with confidence. 

Healthcare systems continuously strive to reduce interruptions at the bedside, including infusion pump alerts. Accrediting organizations recommend reviewing and optimizing infusion pump practices to prevent patient harm and mitigate risk. By identifying the highest alerting medications, healthcare systems can make meaningful changes to their infusion pump drug libraries to improve patient safety.

Drug shortages continue to plague health systems across the United States. Various mitigation strategies are often used to ensure appropriate therapies are available to patients. Sometimes, however, mitigation strategies may have unintended outcomes when administration techniques vary from standard practice.

According to The Joint Commission, smart infusion pumps provide useful ongoing data for analysis to improve safety performance; however, many organizations struggle to access and analyze this data for quality improvement.