‘Where IT Meets IV’ Integrating Intravenous Infusion Devices With Hospital Information Systems

Abstract

Tim Vanderveen is vice president of The Center for Safety and Clinical Excellence for CareFusion. E-mail: tim.vanderveen@ carefusion.com Since 2001, “smart” intravenous (IV) infusion pumps with dose-error-reduction software (DERS) have provided hospitals with critical safeguards against potentially fatal pump programming errors and a treasure trove of previously unavailable information on patient safety, IV practices, and quality of care. Nevertheless, IV infusion errors that result in harmful and even fatal adverse drug events (ADEs) are a continuing concern. In response to numerous safety and performance issues with IV infusion pumps, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) joined with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to host a summit on infusion devices in October 2010. As described in the subsequent conference report, Infusing Patients Safely, a multidisciplinary steering committee was formed to lead a number of working groups in establishing priorities, developing guidelines, and identifying and sharing best practices to improve the safety of IV infusions. Although the agendas of the various working groups are still being developed, the steering committee has adopted a set of future vision statements to help guide it and the working groups in their efforts to make IV infusions safer. The vision boldly describes an attainable state and sets an aggressive national agenda to capitalize on the present opportunities, stating as its mission that “no patient will be harmed from a drug infusion.” The vision starts with establishing wireless connectivity between a hospital’s hundreds of infusion pumps and the hospital’s wireless network. Without this connectivity, other significant advances for improving infusion safety will be impossible to achieve. With this connectivity, an exciting new state of greatly improved safety, quality and productivity can be attained. This article is based on vendor experience in working with hospital partners to implement wireless connectivity for more than 300,000 infusion devices on wireless networks across hospitals of all sizes and levels of complexity. The benefits, challenges and opportunities of integrating infusion devices into hospitals’ health information technology (HIT) systems will be addressed, along with ways to meet the challenges. The potential impact of the continuing convergence of clinical engineering and information technology (IT) will also be covered.