title: A case study on the safety impact of implementing smart patient-controlled analgesic pumps at a tertiary care academic medical center.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  As with the use of any therapy involving opioids, patient-controlled analgesia (PCA)-related errors can lead to overdose and even death. "Smart" (computerized) pumps have medication safety enhancements, particularly those related to operator errors during administration, to improve overall safety and efficacy. After the occurrence of PCA-related errors that occurred at a tertiary care academic medical center, an analysis of PCA errors was conducted. The introduction of smart pumps was identified as a possible solution, and the medical center adopted the technology in 2006. A study was conducted to investigate the impact of implementation.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The study had three primary objectives: (1) to evaluate history logs stored in the smart PCA pumps to characterize the nature of hard and soft stop alerts and identify potential errors that may have been averted, (2) to examine the impact of smart PCA pumps on voluntarily reported PCA therapy-related errors, and (3) to assess nursing perceptions regarding the improvement in safety due to the introduction of smart PCA pumps. The smart pumps potentially prevented 159 errors for the January-June 2007 period; upper hard limits had the most number of alerts, representing avoidance of errors with the greatest potential to be detrimental to the patient. In addition, pump-programming errors due to wrong concentration were eliminated after implementation. Finally, nursing staff perceived smart pumps to be valuable in improving patient safety.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Smart PCA pumps had an important positive impact on PCA-related patient safety at the medical center. Other facilities should adopt PCA devices with additional safety features such as bar-code verification of the drug and concentration, as well as dosage limits, to prevent pump-programming errors.
authors.affiliation: University of Michigan College of Pharmacy, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
authors.forename: Mai
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tran
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ciarkowski
authors.forename: Deborah
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wagner
authors.forename: James G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Stevenson
mesh_terms: D000046:Academic Medical Centers; D016058:Analgesia, Patient-Controlled / Q000009:adverse effects / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D000701:Analgesics, Opioid / Q000008:administration & dosage* / Q000009:adverse effects; D004869:Equipment Safety / Q000295:instrumentation*; D006801:Humans; D007260:Infusion Pumps; D007262:Infusions, Intravenous; D008508:Medication Errors / Q000517:prevention & control; D009741:Nursing Staff, Hospital; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D061214:Patient Safety / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D055512:Tertiary Prevention
chemical_list: D000701:Analgesics, Opioid