For those institutions that utilize continuous albuterol to ventilated patients via the Aerogen nebulizer, can you tell me what syringe pump you are using to delver the medication into the Aerogen nebulizer?

We want to use our Alaris pump but are getting significant push back over the concern for inadvertent IV administration. Aerogen makes specialized syringes and tubing that are incompatible with all IV set ups and we would be utilizing this.

Any thoughts on what other institutions do would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Randi

We recently identified a potential issue with our extended infusion zosyn administration when we found that one of our parter hospitals was routinely following up each dose with a 50ml NS minibag. When experimenting I found that our infusion pumps will stop running once the aid in the tubing reaches our pumps, as they are designed to do. Unfortunately, this means that in many cases 15-18 ml of fluid may remain in our primary infusion sets. When reviewed with nursing staff we found that there is significant variation in practice.

Below is a description of an event that caused quite a concern for our nurse (and me!). I would appreciate your collective experience and wisdom on the safety implications.

Hello,

Friends and Colleges,

Members of the ASHP Medication Safety Section Advisory Group are partnering with members from the Section of Pharmacy Informatics and Technology to learn how we can better partner together to improve patient safety. We would like feedback from as many people as possible:

I wanted to poll the group to see how your Health Information System is set up for providers to search for a drug name. We're doing some clean ups in our system and we decided to revisit this decision since part of the system clean-up revealed that it's inconsistent.

Specifically:
1. Are all the drugs searchable by both brand and generic
2. Are only a subset of drug categories searchable by both brand and generic---otherwise only generic? Which categories..
3. Are drugs only searchable by generic name.

Thanks.
D.Patrick

We are a Cerner hospital and was wondering how other hospitals screen for drug-food interactions. This was brought to our attention from TJC gap analysis.

Thank you for your help.

Hello All,
Our ER department has recently began the practice of initiating Versed drips while in their department. On the nursing units, Versed drips are administered with secure pumps. But the ER states that other institutions do not place scheduled IV infusions on a secure pump. Just wanted to pose the question to the group to see what is transpiring in our facilities. Thanks in advance for your help.

Cicely Williams, PharmD.
Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare
Tallahassee, FL

Hello,

We recently transitioned to dispensing multiple IVIG vials for infusions instead of pooling multiple vials into a bag due to waste and cost concerns.

Nursing is reporting an increase in incomplete doses due to forgetting to hang the remaining vials.

We use EPIC as our EMR, are there any systems that have come up with a solution to this problem?

In a perfect world, nursing would like to receive a prompt/worklist task to scan the next vial so they don't get missed?

Thank you in advance!
Lauren

Have any institutions been asked to load concentrated ketamine (100 mg/ml) in the ED ADM? We currently have the 10 mg/ml strength loaded, but the concentrated ketamine is sent from the Pharmacy patient-specific.