We are anecdotally seeing an increase in infusion reactions to IV ferumoxytol and I am beginning to gather more data. Our standard infusion time for ferumoxytol 510mg is over 15 minutes. We do not routinely pre-medicate patients (i.e. IV steroid), unless specifically ordered by the provider.

Does anyone have a protocol to identify patients who would routinely receive pre-meds?

Any experience with reduced reactions by extending standard infusion time?

Do you load hazardous medications such as tacrolimus (NIOSH table2) to mitigate delays?

We are getting specific requests from hospital leadership about reviewing length of stay for patients requiring long term antibiotic therapy and if there are other opportunities. Currently, most patients remain in the hospital due to the potential of IV access promoting ease of administration and/or infection risks.

Does anyone have a policy / guidance to RNs about what to do when a scan results in "barcode unreadable"? Pharmacy would suggest that a replacement be obtained, but we do not have a written policy to that effect. Some RNs will get a second RN to double check, but of course that is not as reliable a strategy as a barcode scan. Thanks!

Does anyone have a good process for monitoring medication diversion in locations with over-ride ADCs? This has been a challenge for us in our ED.
Thanks!

One of our nurse educators mentioned that many nurses move the due time on the MAR for medications. We went live with Epic at the end of 2018 and this was noted as a recent practice. (We could not do this in Meditech before.)

Example: due time is 9 am but the nurse moves it to 8 am. Nurses can give a med 1 hr before or 1 hr after the due time.
In the example above, they move the due time to 8 am so that they can give and scan a med at 7:30 am.

They would like to bundle the meds and give them when they assess the patient rather than coming back at 9 am again.

Our institution implemented Code Malignant Hyperthermia (MH) last year.
COde Malignant Hyperthermia was mouthful for the caller and suggest we change the code name.
Any institution with Code MH, how is it called at your institution? Any recommendation?

The ASHP Medication Safety Section Advisory Group will be kicking off the 2020-21 year this month and are looking for ideas around new projects or subjects for work groups. This group is comprised of pharmacy leaders who serve in different roles in varying organizations, but share a passion for medication safety.

We are looking for a national benchmark for insulin harms on the inpatient population. Looking at severe hypoglycemia after administration of any insulin is a great metric put forward from the HIIN collaborative. However, with the quick changing patient mix toward the beginning of the year we quickly changed to harms/100,000 discharges which actually was a bit stable and conforms quite well to a control chart.

Either way, finding a benchmark of any type of metric would be desirable so we can continue to look at goal-setting.

For patients with scheduled PET scan, we generally avoid Dextrose containing meds, including any IV with D5W as the diluent 12 hours prior.

This is a challenge in the inpatient setting.

I'm wondering what system/workflow you have at your institution to ensure that patients scheduled for PET scan would not receive any D5W.

Is pharmacy or nursing involved in screening for patients scheduled for PET scan? and screening/switching IV drug diluents?

Thank you so much!