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"This spring, Antelope Memorial Hospital began offering new state-of-the-art intravenous smart pumps for its patients requiring IV therapy," said Merry Sprout, director of nursing at AMH. "The IV smart pumps have drug libraries and dose error reduction systems which assist in keeping patients safe by giving the right dose at the right time. Thus, it provides a mean for decreasing IV medication administration errors."

In the past, intravenous pumps required manual calculations for the rate of infusion of medications, followed by the user inputting the desired infusion rate into the pump, according to Sprout.

"Because there were many different units of measure used for administering IV meds, the required calculations were often complex and increased the chance of user error."

In contrast, AMH's new IV smart pumps allow the user to choose the desired medication from an approved list and input the required patient information. The infusion rate of the medication is then automatically calculated by the IV smart pump. AMH's registered pharmacist, Rebecca Schainost, set up the medication infusion parameters for the IV smart pumps' drug libraries and DERS to personalize them to AMH's patient needs.

"Drug libraries contain the most commonly used IV medications and alert the user if the calculated infusion rate exceeds normally acceptable dosing limits," Sprout said. "These limits can be expressed as either hard dose or soft dose."

Hard-dose limits cannot be bypassed by users at the pump, thereby preventing users from starting the pump. Soft-dose limits provide a warning that the dose may be close to reaching upper dose limits but will still allow users to start the infusion as programmed after the limits are acknowledged.

"We're very pleased to now offer IV smart pumps at Antelope Memorial Hospital," said Schainost. "They provide state-of-the art technology and are indispensable in the administration of medications and fluids, They take the administration of our patients' IV therapy to a higher level of safety, reflecting our commitment to excellence at AMH."