Best Practice Recommendations for
Infusion Pump Information Network Integration
A Whitepaper From:
The AAMI Foundation Healthcare Technology Safety Institute
Pump integration requires pervasive and reliable wireless coverage–if pumps can’t communicate with the server via a wireless network, no integration can occur.
Introduction:
Closed-loop medication administration with infusion devices is being driven by the healthcare community in order to improve patient safety and to meet electronic health record (EHR) goals under the Meaningful Use provisions of the ARRA-HITECH act.
Therefore, hospitals are exploring the following infusion pump functionalities that not only can reduce errors thus improving safety, but also reduce manual data entry:
- Auto-programming, in which orders are sent to the pump to be confirmed by a nurse before starting infusions
- Auto-verification, in which a nurse manually programs the infusion pump and then the programming is checked against a medication order
- Auto-documentation, in which pump programming, status, and alerts are automatically fed into the patient’s electronic medication record for confirmation
- EHR alerting systems that bring together diverse patient information and pump data to generate combinational alerts in near real time.
Although these integrative processes and functionalities facilitate accurate, timely, and complete charting of medication infusions, only a handful of healthcare facilities in the United States have adopted one or more of them. Why is integration of pumps with electronic/information systems so slow to take off? In this paper, authors provide current barriers to closed-loop medication administration and offer best practices from some of the early adopters.
CLICK HERE to view/download the rest of this Whitpaper.
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Healthcare Technology Safety Institute website.
