From the May 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Infusion management has changed significantly over the past several years. With an increased focus on medication error reduction, reduced costs and improved outcomes, infusion management is no longer just about delivering fluids or exporting data. It is about turning information into knowledge and providing that knowledge to clinicians throughout the entire infusion delivery process.
Consistent with the desire to drive down the cost of care is the growing trend to consider moving many therapies outside the four walls of the hospital. Recent advances in telemedicine systems provide encouraging opportunities to both manage and monitor infusions that occur outside of the hospital. However, existing infusion management systems would be challenged to do so.
The time for a next generation infusion system is upon us. To achieve the transformation needed, this system must be as much an information system as it is a fluid delivery system. This infusion system must be simple and intuitive to use, help simplify clinical workflows, use information to provide insights to clinicians and eliminate the distractions and complexities common in the management of infusions today. Providing and making use of clinical information to help save lives becomes the guiding principle in the design of this next-generation system.
The infusion management system must be built upon four cornerstones: clinical applications; a rich data set; malleable data interfaces; and an extensible, secure infrastructure. Clinical applications provide an interface to the user and should exist both at the bedside and away from the patient. The ideal device would provide an intuitive user interface much like what we expect from smart-phones and other intelligent mobile devices. This user interface is not only used for programming, it becomes a portal that helps inform the clinician’s decisions and actions throughout the infusion delivery process.
Once started, the majority of infusion delivery occurs while the clinician is away from the patient. This drives the need for applications that provide remote monitoring and workflow advisories, helping clinicians to prioritize the flow of care. Through remote monitoring applications, the patient’s therapy could be monitored from virtually anywhere. All of this helps streamline the flow of care, reduce waste and better inform clinical decisions.
An infusion management system’s data set drives its ability to correlate data and present it in a way that optimally supports clinical decisions. Drug libraries, drug allergies, drug-drug interactions, incompatibilities and clinical lab results can all be used to inform the clinician during infusion delivery. Though in no way equivalent to the EMR, the value of the infusion management system increases exponentially with its ability to correlate, analyze and present this knowledge.
