APSF developed a new paradigm based on 3 principles:standardization, technology, and prefilled or premixed medications. These principles emphasize not only areas in which safety has been lacking but also opportunities for growth and development.
Standardization of High-Alert Medications. Medications such as phenylephrine or ephedrine should be prepared by a pharmacy to ensure that the syringes and infusions have a standardized concentration and
label. When prepared by anesthetists, high-alert drugs can be prepared in different strengths depending on provider preference, and this practice can easily result in administration errors, especially when a second provider administers the drug. The standardization of high-alert medications will eliminate the potential for error when diluting and preparing medications and will increase the safety of the patients and staff.
• Standardization of Workspace. Standardization also refers to the anesthesia workspace in terms of the arrangement of the medications and equipment. Organizing drug trays to eliminate the proximity of sound-alike or look-alike medications will help decrease the number of ADEs. The removal of rarely used medications from the workspace will help reduce the potential to prepare and administer the wrong medication. A pharmacy located in the surgical area can be beneficial in developing and maintaining medication trays and in dispensing the less common medications. The sterile preparation of medications by the pharmacy is standard in inpatient units and is a standard of the Joint Commission, but this standard is not strictly adhered to in surgical areas. Furthermore, the APSF recommends the elimination of
provider-prepared medications whenever possible and the use of pre-prepared kits or drug trays whenever possible. These standardizations will result in universally used dilutions and concentrations of high-alert medications and will help reduce the number of wasted medications that are prepared and never used.
• Standardization of Technology. Along with the standardization of high-alert medications and workstations, the standardization of the technology used will also help reduce the number of adverse events. Electronic health records are widely used in operating rooms, but the full potential of using these systems in medication administration has not been fully realized. The APSF recommends using BCMA because it provides visual and auditory feedback that can assist anesthesia providers in delivering safer care. Just as intraoperative monitoring has changed the safety of anesthesia, BCMA can help reduce morbidity and mortality caused by ADEs. Systems for BCMA provide secondary verification of the 6 rights of medication administration: right medication, route, time, patient, dosage, and documentation.
The provider chooses a medication and scans the standardized barcode on the medication. The computer then voices the medication and concentration as a secondary verification for the anesthesia provider before the medication is injected. Along with verifying the medication, the computer documents the administration of the medication in real time on the electronic anesthesia record, which further reduces the number of ADEs resulting from inaccuracies in recording the medications administered.
Compliance and Cost of Barcode Medication
Administration
An increase in patient safety resulting from BCMA use is dependent on the provider’s use of the technology available. Alarms and limits on ventilators, intravenous pumps, and monitors are in place to protect the patients and assist the providers in delivering safe anesthetics. These types of alarms and limits are available in BCMA systems, but providers must acknowledge and use them to provide safer care. The rate of errors using BCMA is inversely proportional to compliance with system alarms. It has been shown that the number of ADEs decreases when anesthetists adhere to the following principles of BCMA use: scanning each medication before administration, keeping the audible voice prompts enabled, and
reacting to system warnings.
The use of BCMA and premixed or prefilled syringes in the operating room may increase costs during the
initial implementation phase, depending on the facility’s technology and use of electronic health records, but will eventually generate savings in time, safety, and the documentation of medications administered. According to the IOM, approximately $2 billion is spent annually on ADEs in hospital settings. This amount does not reflect the costs associated with errors in outpatient and office settings or in hospitals that do not use electronic medical records and data collection. If BCMA is not used in operating
rooms, a pharmacy located in the surgical area would be beneficial in assisting with the preparation,
dispensing, and inventory of medications. This type of setting, however, would require additional pharmacy staff. Systems for BCMA can accomplish all of these tasks and provide a means of communication between the pharmacy and anesthesia providers without needing a pharmacy representative in the surgical area.
• Implementation. The initial cost for implementing BCMA depends on the technology infrastructure available in the facility and operating room (Figure 3). If a facility does not have electronic pharmacy management and patient medical record documentation in place, the cost will be greater because of the need to plan, staff, train, initiate, and monitor the implementation of a new system. If a hospital is required to implement electronic pharmacy management and BCMA without any previous infrastructure in place that can be upgraded, the estimated cost is between $35,600 and $54,600 per BCMAenabled
bed. This estimate includes system upgrades and hardware replacement. The cost potentially could be
reduced by half or more if an electronic pharmacy management and electronic health record infrastructure is already in place.
On evaluating the cost of implementation, it is imperative to compare the cost of implementation with the cost of errors prevented because of BCMA use. It has been shown that BCMA prevents an average of 1.1% (range, 0.4% to 1.9%) of errors associated with medication administration. This value represents an operating cost of $2,000 per moderate to severe medication error prevented. Compared with the amount proposed by the IOM that is spent on ADEs, $2,000 is a fraction of the total cost to healthcare consumers and facilities. A MEDMARX data report (Quantros Inc) found that as many as 81% of medication errors occur in the operating room and postanesthesia care unit. This number of errors justifies the implementation of a BCMA system in surgical areas. Clearly, the initial cost of implementing a BCMA system is a large investment for any hospital, but the return on this investment in the form of a reduced number of costly and potentially deadly ADEs is equally great, if not greater.
Compliance. The use of prefilled or premixed medicationscan be beneficial for the entire facility, especiallywhen used in conjunction with BCMA. Not only doesthe APSF recommend using prefilled or premixed drugs,but Joint Commission standard MM.05.01.07 states thatthe preparation of medications should be done by apharmacist or pharmacy staff under the supervision of a pharmacist under sterile conditions except in urgent conditions. The preparation of medications by the pharmacy provides additional verification in addition to BCMA use that will help ensure safer medication administration. Fortier and Kellner found that 452 of 896 drug errors in the operating room, which is approximately 0.4%, are the result of drug syringe and preparation errors, including syringe swaps, incorrect vial selection,
and syringe labeling error. The preparation of medications by the pharmacy staff ensures the sterility and integrity of medications and the standardized labeling of the syringes, and these steps should increase medication administration safety. In addition to increasing safe medication administration, anesthetists will be able to concentrate on patient management rather than medication preparation, especially in emergency situations. Just as medication preparation by anesthetists is time consuming, the in-house preparation of prefilled syringes is also time consuming for the pharmacy staff. Compounding pharmacies can reduce the responsibility of medication management, but outsourcing can be costly depending on the number of different medications and the amount ordered. To help control the costs of outsourcing the preparation of some medications, an evaluation of the commonly used medications and the medications that are frequently wasted will help determine which drugs would be more cost effective to purchase from compounding pharmacies. It may be slightly more expensive to outsource the preparation of prefilled syringes, but the savings associated with preventing ADEs justifies the cost.
Costs. Barcode medication administration not only helps reduce the costs associated with ADEs but also is useful for tracking medication use and waste, both of which must be tracked and documented by the pharmacy,according to Joint Commission regulations.5 Regulations
by the CMS state that only medications administered to patients can be charged for, and these charges are
determined by dosage given to patients and not by the dispensing unit. Handwritten anesthesia records can be inaccurate when determining which medications are used for an anesthetic and the dosages given. These circumstances create additional work for the pharmacy staff who must confirm that the criteria are met for the billing of drugs. When providers dispense a medication via BCMA, the system requires documentation of the dosage and creates an accurate and appropriate record of the drugs administered. Therefore, these electronic records assist the pharmacy with the tracking and inventory of medications. Furthermore, these typ