Smart Pumps Essay

911 Words4 Pages
Smart Pumps: The smart choice for medicine Medication errors are extremely dangerous and potentially deadly to patients. According to a recent release of the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) report, preventing medication errors, they found that medication mistakes injure more than 1.5 million patients each year. Also, that hospitalized patients are at risk for at least one medication error per patient day (IOM, 2006). Traditional infusion devices make it easy for clinicians to commit these errors. There are no safeguards in place and the infusion devices are often shared between many patients with extremely different infusion needs throughout the day. This can be extremely dangerous, especially when dealing with high alert medications such as insulin, heparin, opiates, and vasoactive drugs. With technology changing, new tools are being invented to help reduce medication errors and increase patient safety. Many institutions have begun to take the necessary steps to help reduce these errors by switching from traditional infusions pumps, to smart pumps. Smart pumps, particularly Carefusion’s Alaris SE pump, runs the guardrails suite MX software. This smart pump along with others like it, are medication infusion devices. These types of devices contain programmed drug libraries with standardized medication concentrations, for the most commonly used drugs. These smart pumps are programmed by the hospital pharmacy with the types of IV medications, along with concentration and standard dosing. Before administration can begin, the caregiver must choose the desired medication along with the concentration from the library. The pump then determines whether or not the medication dose and rate are appropriate and if so, administration may begin. However if the smart pump determines the medication to be inappropriate, the pump will alarm with either a soft alert, or a hard
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