CareFusion Rolls Out Infusion Pump Interoperability Solution
CareFusion Corp., a leading, global medical technology company, has announced that Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota has completed the rollout of an infusion pump interoperability solution at its Children’s – St. Paul Hospital campus.
The solution connects the hospital’s Alaris®System smart infusion pumps with the Cerner Millennium®[1] electronic health record (EHR) and is designed to help reduce the risk of harmful and costly intravenous (IV) medication programming errors at the patient bedside. This follows the 2012 implementation at Children’s Minneapolis campus, and now all 381 inpatient beds are live for IV medication administered through both the pump and syringe modules of the Alaris System.
Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota is the first pediatric hospital system in the U.S. to enable bi-directional communication between the infusion pump and the EHR for both syringe pumps and large volume infusions.
“Since implementing interoperability last year at our Minneapolis campus, we have seen on average an increase of 57 percent in smart pump drug safety parameters utilization and we are sustaining at this level,” said Bobbie Carroll, senior director of patient safety and informatics at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota. “We have also seen a 37 percent decline in safety learning reports related to medication administration events. The interoperability solution is definitely making our hospitals safer for both large volume and syringe infusions.”
IV medication errors are twice as likely to cause harm to patients as medications delivered via other routes of administration,[2]and intravenous medications represent approximately 60 percent of the most serious and costly medication errors.[3] With interoperability through the Cerner CareAware iBus™1, the Alaris system can be wirelessly pre-populated with infusion order parameters directly from the Cerner Millennium EHR. Instead of manually programming the pump using the keypad at the bedside, the pump is pre-programmed after scanning a barcode on the smart pump via Cerner’s Point of Care Medication Administration solution. Programming pumps with infusion parameters from the verified physician order helps ensure accurate medication administration and documentation and reduces opportunities for human error.
The solution helps ensure more consistency in medication management practices and provides comprehensive, near real-time data to help staff in the pharmacy and patient care areas view infusion status and documentation through Cerner CareAware Infusion Management™1 with nursing, pharmacy and ICU dashboards. Approximately 225 of Children’s of Minnesota’s 381 beds are considered critical care and those patients require a substantial volume of high-risk infusions.
Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota has received multiple awards for its interoperability implementation. In April, Children’s received the Way Paver Award for Institutional Achievement, where they were one of two organizations recognized for hurdles jumped in implementing a BPOC (barcode point-of-care) system for neonatal and pediatric care above and beyond the usual clinical, technological and human factors challenges. Children’s also received the Process/System Innovation Award from the Minnesota Alliance for Patient Safety. The award honored the implementation of barcoded medication administration and infusion interoperability solutions, which was reported to reduce adverse medication events from seven in 10,000 to two in 10,000, and triggered 234 medication alerts or “good catches” out of 11,000 doses in one month on one unit.
In 2010, CareFusion and Cerner entered into a strategic agreement to closely integrate their industry-leading technologies to develop solutions that help hospitals and health care providers deliver better patient care through greater system connectivity and interoperability. Since that time, the companies have connected CareFusion’s Pyxis® automated medication dispensing and supply management systems, Alaris® infusion pumps and CareFusion ventilators with Cerner CareAware iBus and Cerner Millennium, enabling hospitals to achieve greater device interoperability to enhance patient safety and clinical workflows.