Quality Forum Finalizes Health IT Report
With a nod to the work of the AAMI Foundation’s Healthcare Technology Safety Institute, the National Quality Forum (NQF) has released a final report on the “state of electronic data readiness” as it relates to infusion systems and how to make improvements on that front.
In the report, Critical Paths for Creating Data Platforms: Patient Safety, NQF says that its goal is to understand data readiness and the “current gaps in data exchange that, if filled, would allow for more robust infusion system safety measurement and improvement.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asked NQF, an advocacy organization that works to improve healthcare quality, to draft the report.
NQF focused on infusion systems because “patient injuries resulting from drug therapy are among the most common types of adverse events that occur in hospitals,” the report reads. “According to one U.S.-based study, medication administration errors occur at a rate of 11.1 errors per 100 doses. Of preventable adverse drug events, 54% occur during intravenous drug administration.”
The NQF report cites two installments of HTSI’s Safety Innovations series. One of the installments, Best Practice Recommendations for Infusion Pump-Information Network Integration, outlines infrastructure needs such as reliable and secure wireless networks, and electronic repositories for data.
“These infrastructure requirements lay a foundation for standard-based interoperability of infusion devices,” the report says.
The other HTSI paper cited in the report is, Smart Pump Implementation: A Guide for Healthcare Institutions.
The report also details the conclusions from a technical expert panel formed by the NQF. The panel was assembled to help assess “the ability of existing health information technology (health IT) infrastructure to support quality reporting of intravenous infusion therapy using infusion pump medical devices.”
The panel surveyed health IT readiness at nine healthcare facilities “None of the sites that participated in the environmental scan have a fully electronic and integrated system for infusion therapy that allows for digital data capture and exchange at every step of the workflow,” the report reads.
Hospitals should adopt a standardized format for data collection, and use that data for decision support, the panel recommended.
To read the infusion pump report, click here. For more information on HTSI, click here.
Posted: November 13, 2012