Infusion system safety, a subject of intense interest for medical device manufacturers, clinicians, regulators, healthcare technology experts, and patient safety advocates, is the focus of the newly released issue of AAMI’s award-winning Horizons magazine. The concepts and approaches of articles featured in the fall 2015 issue include the following:
• A roundtable discussion in which leading experts weigh in on questions such as: What recent advances have been made to improve infusion system safety? How can human factors engineering and user-centered design make infusion pumps easier to use? How effective is training on the use of infusion devices? For hospitals with smart pump technology, what is being done to ensure clinician compliance with the use of drug libraries for infusions?
• Research on how a simplified user interface for intravenous smart pumps can improve programming times and reduce use errors.
• Perspectives on how improved smart pump drug library use can help eliminate clinical workarounds.
• Evidence of how syringe infusion pump programming errors can be decreased through the use of weight-based safety parameters for intermittent infusions.
• The challenges and rewards of one group’s smart pump implementation efforts, including wireless issues, support-related challenges, and the leveraging of quality data to improve pump safety and usefulness.
• A report on how human factors engineering and a simulated-use validation study was used to achieve improved ease of infusion pump programming, resulting in improved drug library compliance rates.
Horizons is a peer-reviewed supplement to AAMI’s journal BI&T (Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology).
New Guidance for Establishing an HTM Association
AAMI has published a new guide for establishing a local healthcare technology management (HTM) association. This guide, aptly called How to Establish and Formalize an HTM Association, aims to provide the most complete information about what a successful organization needs to do to develop, sustain, and promote itself.
The process of establishing a local HTM association, whether it be city, state, or regional, can be a complicated and difficult task. This booklet outlines a suggested path for establishing a new association that ranges from determining interest level and raising operating funds to applying to become a federal tax-exempt organization to creating a website and increasing membership.
The new guide builds on a similar publication produced in 2004 by AAMI’s Technology Management Council. Over the last few months, a committee of dedicated AAMI members has restructured the content and updated guidance to reflect advances in technology. The full text of the guide is available at www.aami.org.
IUSS Questions Added to Benchmarking Tool
Eleven new questions pertaining to immediate-use stem sterilization (IUSS) procedures were added to AAMI’s sterilization benchmarking tool. Benchmarking Solutions – Sterile Processing is a digital platform designed to help sterile processing departments measure their budgets, personnel, practices, and policies against similar departments at other facilities.
“These questions were added to the platform as part of our continuous improvement and feedback loop from our subscribers and the joint AAMI-IAHCSMM task force. We heard that this was a topic that the industry wanted to benchmark, and we listened,” said Damien Berg, manager of sterile processing at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. Berg has played a key role in the development of the benchmarking tool.
Many facilities have been working to reduce their use of IUSS to improve patient care and safety; however, reducing IUSS use usually involves purchasing more instrumentation. The sterile processing benchmarking tool can provide valuable information to support these purchasing requests.
“Benchmarking of IUSS can help subscribers to justify the expenditures needed to minimize the use of IUSS,” said Donna Swenson, president of Sterile Processing Quality Services Inc., and a member of AAMI sterilization standards committees. “When administrators see that reduction of IUSS is a goal of most healthcare facilities, it is easier to justify the expenditure that is needed to make that happen.”
This platform now contains 195 questions that cover:
• Healthcare Facility: Characteristics, Clinical Relationships, Compliance
• SPD Scope: Best Practices, Policy Involvement, Responsibilities, and Reporting
• Current Sterilization Procedures and Practices: Performance, Current Practices, Surgical Procedures, IUSS Procedures-New, Error Rate
• Staffing: Current SPD Staff, Non-SPD Staff, Qualifications, Training, and Continuing Education
• Productivity Analysis: Intensity 1, Intensity 2, Intensity 3, Intensity 4, FTE Results
• Resources: Budget/Financial, Space Resources, Computer Resources
For more information, please visit www.aami.org/benchmarking.