This month, Maasstad Hospital started connecting 900 smart infusion pumps to the Electronic Health Record (EHR). This means that the information about medication and fluids administered to patients via these infusions is now automatically processed in the EHR. This not only improves the quality of the registrations, it also saves a lot of administrative manual work for the care staff.
More than 900 smart infusion pumps, the BBraun Spaceplus, are being used at Maasstad Hospital. Initially, 60 pumps from the Coronary Care Unit (CCU or heart monitoring) are connected. The hospital aims to complete the connection of all infusion pumps by early 2025. By directly connecting the infusion pumps digitally to the EHR system, all data, such as start time, stop time, type of medication and changes in the pump's running speed, are now continuously and automatically recorded in the EHR.
Central monitoring of infusion pumps
In addition, this solution offers healthcare providers the possibility to continuously monitor a patient's fluid balance from one central location, for example. This allows them to act sooner if it appears that a change in the admission of fluid or medication is necessary. An additional advantage is that all actions performed on the pumps themselves (with the patient) are also directly registered. The automatic registration of the data from the smart infusion pumps not only ensures that this data is now recorded even more accurately, it also saves healthcare providers administrative time.
Until now, they had to manually enter all changes in the admission speed and dosage of medication or fluid in the EHR. This manual registration then also had to be checked by a colleague. A time-consuming process that has now been automated. "The new infusion pumps really free up more time that we can spend on paying attention to the patient. We are very happy with that, and the patient probably is too!", says Mathilde, a nurse at the CCU and involved in this project.
“The switch to these ‘smart’ infusion pumps will mean a major improvement for our patient care. The settings of each pump can be precisely tailored to what a patient needs and every change is automatically registered. Technical updates of the 900 pumps can be done in a few days. A major step forward in the field of patient safety and reducing the administrative and technical burden,” says Sander Dekker, director of the Maasstad Hospital.
Reducing the administrative burden
Reducing the administrative burden for healthcare professionals is also one of the important topics that the new Dutch Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport is focusing on in the battle to deal with the staff shortage and the ever-increasing workload.
The connection of (smart) systems, such as the infusion pumps at the Maasstad Hospital, is an example of how technology can play a role in reducing the administrative burden. Other examples include Dragon Medical One, a generative AI-based solution for automatically generating conversation reports between doctor and patient, and eOverdracht.
