UW Hospital and Clinics installs “smart” intravenous pumps

Sixty percent of the harmful medication errors that occur in hospitals are related to IV infusion pumps.

Eliminating these errors is the reason UW Hospital and Clinics has installed a new medication safety system developed by San Diego-based Alaris Medical Systems Inc. The system, also called a “smart” infusion system, features a software program that provides computerized decision support to nurses and physicians at the patient’s bedside, helping to prevent serious dosing errors.

“What this new technology does is to put a smart drug library into the infusion pump, so that based on which drug the nurse tells the pump she’s about to administer, the pump alerts her if she inadvertently exceeds a pre-established minimum or maximum dosing allowance for the medication,” explains Susan Kleppin, a senior clinical pharmacist with UW Hospital and Clinics. “The system provides an extra layer of protection by alerting the clinician when a programmed dose is outside pre-established dosage limits for that medication, thus helping to prevent a wrong dose from being administered to the patient.”

UW Hospital and Clinics is among a handful of hospitals nationwide to implement “smart” infusion pump technology, and one of the first hospitals in the country to receive money from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to study the patient benefits of the technology.