QIM19-143: Reducing Risk of IV Chemotherapy Administration Errors Utilizing Pump Integration Technology

Abstract

Background: The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - James Cancer Hospital and Solve Research Institute is a 356-bed cancer care hospital that is part of The Ohio State University Medical Center. In addition to the inpatient beds, the hospital services 175 ambulatory infusion chairs. Each month, we administer over 6,000 chemotherapy infusions on an IV pump. Smart IV pumps in tandem with hospital information technology infrastructure integrate IV drug administration pump data with the electronic medical record (EMR) and computerized physician order entry to decrease risk of error and increase patient safety. The closed loop system transmits the medication infusion rate and the prescribed dose to the smart pump to deliver the medication. The smart pump in turn transmits the dose and volume delivered to the EMR to accurately capture what the patient received. The ability to wirelessly transmit clinical information from the EMR to automatically program the IV pump with specific data was implemented in March 2018 as part of a system-wide safety initiative to enhance patient safety via the reduction of error during medication administration. Methods: IV pump integration has been in use since March 2018; the organization has robust data on the use of smart pump technology that allowed for comparison of data pre- and postimplementation of pump integration. This includes: total suite usage, count of basic infusions, severe harm averted, total good catches, and event-reporting data. Post-integration, the overall compliance of utilizing pump integration (sending an order from the EMR to the smart IV pump) is also continuously monitored. Results: The implementation of pump interoperability resulted in a safer delivery of infused medications (Figure 1). The use of “basic Infusion” or unprotected infusion function decreased while our use of the appropriate safeguarded pump program increased. The compliance at the medical center increased from about 86% to almost 94%. With increased usage of the pump interoperability, the potential for severe harm as well as human programming errors decreased significantly. Conclusion: The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - James Cancer Hospital and Solve Research Institute is able to deliver infused medications via a smart pump in a safer, more automated system with the implementation of pump integration. We are able to reduce the “human factor” in medication delivery by reducing keystrokes and opportunities for manual programming errors. Pre-integration data cannot be isolated for the cancer hospital only, from our post-implementation data we can infer that our chemotherapy infusions are subsequently safer for our patients.