Written by Alberta Guy, RN, BSN, Clinical Consultant, Professional Services
Whenever a hospital takes on a Smart Pump EHR integration (SPEHRI) project, there are usually measurable goals or outcomes around compliance and patient safety initiatives that are initially established to determine if the project is a success. It’s important to establish the primary goal along with the best way to measure success.
For example, a hospital may have decided to implement Smart Pump integration with the goal of improving charge capture. Alternatively, the goal could be set to improve drug library utilization or decrease IV medication errors.
Let’s take a closer look at the utilization of drug library monitoring – to understand how Smart Pump EHR integration specifically helps organizations achieve this goal.
Many hospitals already utilize reports from the pump vendor to monitor drug library utilization. Yet for most, these reports are missing statistics to help monitor compliance.
Compliance with smart pump programming (SPP) means the nurse uses the ‘send to pump’ button and completes the scanning of the pump barcode to send the order data to the pump.
Non-compliance could mean the nurse declines clicking the ‘send to pump’ button or exits out of the pump programming form - both resulting in the nurse manually programming the pump.
This non-compliance can lead to patient safety issues like medication errors, staffing irregularities like drug diversion. The hospital could be losing reimbursement for IV therapy. Non-compliance of SPP results in inaccurate or missing IV documentation and without start and stop times for IVs, the hospital loses the ability to capture charges.
Having the tools to monitor compliance is key to SPEHRI success. You’ll want to invest in a tool that can tell at a glance how many successful SPPs were completed each month. You can drill down to the unit level, which assists with determining areas that may counseling. The dashboard also provides the programming errors which helps determine if there are medications not aligned with the drug library or medications not ordered correctly. It can assist with determining if there’s a need for reeducation.
Another helpful tool is monitoring individuals who try to take shortcuts . Utilizing a query tool helps identify those patients whose nurse launched the SPP form but then exit before scanning the pump barcode. Again, this non-compliance can have a detrimental effect on the wellbeing and safety of the patient.
Conclusion:
Having all the tools in your toolbox when implementing smart pump technology is key to monitoring compliance and meeting the goals and metrics of SPEHRI. In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about smart pump solutions and how to stay compliant, please reach out to us at info@iatric.com to discuss your challenges and goals.
