Collaboration Fuels Success of Infusion Management Interoperability Initiative.

Great River Medical Center (GRMC) is a 378-bed regional facility offering acute and intermediate care to residents of southeast Iowa, west-central Illinois, and northeast Missouri. The hospital, which admits more than 6,500 patients and logs more than 190,000 outpatient visits annually, offers comprehensive medical and extensive surgical services. In 2013, GRMC began a patient safety initiative related to infusion management interoperability. The objective of the initiative, which was identified by senior administration during a transition to a new electronic health record (EHR) vendor, was to improve medication safety and prevent patient harm. Interoperability provides for pump autoprogramming of the electronic medication order directly into the infusion pump, which reduces the number of manual programming steps and the associated risk of programming error. Interoperability also enables pump autodocumentation, allowing clinical staff to pull accurate infusion rates and volumes in real time into the EHR. It eliminates the need to manually document frequent rate changes for critical patients. This added functionality closes the loop on medication administration safety by helping to ensure “right patient, right medication, right dose, right route, right time, and right documentation.” This article describes GRMC’s infusion management interoperability initiative, process improvement results, and keys to success.