The AAMI Foundation has named the recipients of funding from the Mary K. Logan Research Awards Program for 2018. The two grants, worth a total of $79,950, will go to researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Ohio for projects focused on reducing pediatric medication errors.

This awards program, which was named in honor of AAMI’s former president and CEO, was established in 2016 with a gift from the association’s Board of Directors. It is intended to support research and initiatives that focus on improving patient safety and eliminating morbidity and mortality associated with the use of health technology.

“The AAMI Foundation is extremely proud to support the vital pediatric research being conducted at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine,” said Christine V. Emery, executive director of the AAMI Foundation. “Patient safety is at the heart of our mission, and it is through well-designed scientific studies such as these that we hope to provide enhanced tools and promote systemic changes that will improve the protection of even the most vulnerable patients.”
Improving Medication Administration Safety in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
The AAMI Foundation awarded $39,950 to a Brigham and Women’s Hospital research team, led by Kumiko O. Schnock, RN, PhD, a research associate in the Department of Medicine. The group will focus on refining an existing data collection tool that has been tested with adults to determine the frequency and type of intravenous (IV) medication administration errors that occur when using smart pumps in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Such errors can have potentially severe consequences.

“There is currently no standardized approach to measuring IV medication administration safety in NICUs,” Schnock said. “Our observation tool is novel in that it can detect various types of IV medication administration errors through a systemic collection of information about the IV medication administered and a comparison of that information to existing medication errors. This tool automatically identifies the ‘five rights’ of medication-use errors and helps categorize the severity of each detected error’s harm.”

Once the tool is developed, the research team will conduct a pilot study to validate it and then will use the tool to identify issues associated with smart pump medication administration in the NICU.

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