Intravenous Infusion PumpsMedication error: infusion pumpBillions of dollars are spent on health care that never directly affect patient care. Smart pumps, however can improve patient safety by reducing medication administration errors (Harding, 2013). An intravenous smart pump helps nurses regulate the correct rate and line of infusion. Infusing an Intravenous solution without a pump its like a time bomb waiting to explode. Before Intravenous pump was not introduced, many catastrophic errors had happened which puts patients safety in jeopardy. For instants, a patient is suppose received heparin drip at 800 units per hour and normal saline at 75ml per hour. They were both hung at the same time but during the infusion setup the nurse accidentally set the wrong flow rate for the infusion. She set the flow rate for normal saline to infuse using the heparin drip rate and heparin drip rate at normal salines flow rate (Paparella, Wollitz &Horsham, 2014). Mistakes like this happens on daily basis before the intravenous pumps was implemented. The patient that was suppose to get his 800 units of heparin per hour ended up getting more than he should, sometimes little mistakes happens but in this case the consequences is deadly. The patient is getting heparin as a blood thinner to thin their blood but with increase dosage of heparin it could cause the patient to bleed out and death if the situation was not resolved in timely manner. If the infusion was run on a pump the line would be organized and programed into the pump, there would be no chance of setting up the wrong rate for the wrong infusion. Infusion pumps makes mistakes less likely to happen but its still up to the nurse to always check what they have on hand and compare with what they are infusing. In another case the patients systolic pressure started dropping and IV nor-epinephrine was ordered to maintained systolic blood pressure over 90 mm Hg, not long after the infusion was started the patients systolic blood pressure drop to 68/30. The nurse then realized that the line was not even connected when she was ordered to increase the dosage of nor-epinephrine (Paparella, Wollitz& Horsham, 2014). If a smart pump was implemented in place and a line was blocked off, the infusion pump will simply start beeping letting the nurse know that something is going on with the line or something is wrong with the infusion. Instead of coming back at the end of the shift only to find your patients line not running and not medication was not getting deliver properly to the patient. Intravenous Pumps works along the side of nurses and patients, it boost confident of the patient that they are getting the correct infusion rate they need and also reduce human errors. It acts as a last line of defense before the IV is being infused into the patient.

Even though intravenous pump significantly decreases medication errors but there are currently few limitation to how much the intravenous pump can do. For example, the intravenous pump cannot operate without human commands unless the dosage is out of therapeutic range. The IV pump cannot verified patient identity itself but some offers a bar code identification through the MAR. lastly IV pump cannot assess patient in case of phlebitis , infiltration or extravasation ( Harding, 2013).