Guardrails™ Safety Software for the Alaris™ Plus Platform
For medication safety and quality auditing
Around the world, medication errors are increasingly being recognised as a serious and growing healthcare problem. Recent studies have indicated that in a typical hospital, medication errors of some form or another occur in nearly one out of every five doses given to a patient. When investigating administration errors in an intensive care setting, a European study revealed that the majority of these had either significant (42%) or life threatening (21%) implications. Although medication errors can happen at any stage of the delivery process, evidence suggests that improvements to administration safety are more likely to have a direct impact on reducing harm to patients.
The Guardrails™ Suite of safety software is a medication safety and quality auditing system designed specifically for infusions. It not only helps protect the patient and the clinician from the consequences of medication errors, it can also positively affect patient outcomes by facilitating continuous improvements in the quality of practice. This ‘smart-pump’ technology gives you the power to identify, track and, ultimately, help prevent many of the most harmful IV medication errors. As a result, today’s hospitals are beginning to recognise the many clinical and financial advantages of investing in such a patient safety system.
The Guardrails™ Suite can help you to:
- Reduce harmful IV medication errors
- Track and measure system performance
- Improve overall quality of patient care
- Shorten lengths of stay
- Lower insurance premiums
- Reduce litigation exposure
- Increase compliance with national safety standards
Standardising best practices - One of the first and most significant steps towards medication error reduction is the dialogue and team review that takes place within the hospital to provide the starting point for the Guardrails™ Suite data set development. Multidisciplinary teams come together to review drug protocols and establish standardised drug libraries. This critical process can often uncover significant discrepancies in drug usage and administration.
Customised safety - The Guardrails™ Editor Software allows an institution to define infusion parameters for up to 30 care area setups. These care areas are referred to as profiles. Within a profile, up to 100 drugs can be customised - up to 3000 unique drug setups can be defined. Drug setup parameters include - drug concentrations, dosing units, minimum and maximum dose limits, and Hard Limit or soft alert settings.
Specialised Guardrails™ Editor applications allow the creation and review of customised data sets. This helps ensure that data sets are simple to create and can be easily reviewed or audited before implementation.
Guardrails™ Editor – setting the best practice benchmark
- Helps ensure protocols for drug therapy are implemented correctly
- Allows continual auditing and refining of data sets
- Facilitates the definition of parameters and standardisation of best practices
- Prevents unauthorised alteration of dosing parameters
The Guardrails™ Suite gives patients and clinicians peace of mind by automatically double checking programmed infusion rates before administration.
Using a system of Soft and Hard Limits, Guardrails™ Safety Software alerts clinicians when a programmed value exceeds a pre-defined limit. Soft Limits can be overridden with warning indicators appearing on the screen when an infusion is progressing above a pre-defined Soft Limit.
Hard Limits cannot be overridden and the user must reprogram the infusion rate. In either case, the Guardrails™ Safety Software records the events surrounding the response to these alerts.
Guardrails™ Safety Software - helping to protect patients and clinicians
- Acts as safety net for clinicians
- Warns user when set parameters are broken
- Records all activity, including manual overrides
Transforms data into clinical insight - Whether it is attached to a system or operating on its own, an Alaris™ Syringe Pump has the intelligence of the Guardrails™ Suite built in and can store any alert data for up to a year. Once pump data is downloaded, the Guardrails CQI™ Event Reporter offers a comprehensive array of detailed reports and graphs that give insight into drug usage and alerts.
In particular, Guardrails™ CQI Event Reporter software offers a complete audit of compliance, including details of deviation from standard practices: Reprogrammings - where potential errors were avoided; Overrides - which may warrant additional training; or data set fine tuning. Analysis of these reports can then be used to refine data sets or improve clinical practice.
Guardrails™ CQI Event Reporter - knowledge for optimum performance
- Comprehensive audit tools
- Transforms data into detailed reports on drug usage, alerts and deviations from standard procedures
- Delivers essential information that allows you to enhance practice
Through continuous feedback, hospitals can accurately document averted medication errors. The information helps identify education needs and practice changes which will result in improved patient results. It can also help document clinical practice improvements while providing information on averted IV medication errors.
Please note, not all products, services or features of products and services may be available in your local area. Please check with your local BD representative.