Collaboration to Remove Barriers to Pump Integration With the Electronic Health Record.

Background: The Institute for Safe Medication Practices and The Joint Commission recommend the implementation of bidirectional smart infusion pump interoperability with the electronic health record (EHR) to improve medication safety. However, there are barriers associated with implementation of this process.
Purpose: The purpose of this process improvement project was to identify, evaluate, and implement improvements in pump integration with the EHR to decrease manual programming and increase the use of the smart pump functions (the dose error reduction system or infusion guardrails).
Methods: A medication safety task force was formed, and end users were surveyed for barriers. The task force found and implemented solutions to improve the process.
Results: Infusion pump integration rates for seven hospitals improved from 79.4% to 91.8% ( p < .001), and the use of smart pump programming increased from 84.7% to 93.6%.
Conclusions: Including all stakeholders in the project allowed barriers to be identified and solutions to be implemented. As more healthcare systems implement technology-related processes to improve patient safety, this work can guide medication safety teams on how to optimize technology use by removing barriers to the use of pump integration with the EHR.
Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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