Drug administration errors are frequent and are often associated with the misuse of IV infusion pumps. One source of these errors may be the infusion pump's user interface.
We used failure modes-and-effects analyses to identify programming errors and to guide the design of a new syringe pump user interface. We designed the new user interface to clearly show the pump's operating state simultaneously in more than 1 monitoring location. We evaluated anesthesia residents in laboratory and simulated environments on programming accuracy and error detection between the new user interface and the user interface of a commercially available infusion pump.