In the News

The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) is taking action to improve the effective use of infusion pumps amid growing evidence that the devices have become a safety concern.

According to the FDA's medical device incident reports database, infusion devices have been associated with 52,000 adverse incidents and 712 reported deaths during the last five years.

The incidents involve hospital-based devices as well as home health care devices such as insulin pumps. AAMI does not know the number of adverse incidents that occurred in clinical settings as opposed to homes.

No single manufacturer, device type or problem is implicated and experts believe there could be a significant array of causes because of the varied ways the devices are used throughout all clinical areas of health care, AAMI says.

Bob Butterfield, a member of AAMI's Infusion Device Committee and a research engineer for CareFusion, says intravenous pumps are operated by a wide range of hospital personnel and mistakes can easily occur.

The Infusion Device Committee will meet at the 2010 AAMI Annual Conference and Expo June 26-28 in Tampa, Fla., to discuss forming a safety panel of experts from industry, regulatory agencies, clinicians, clinical technology managers and others to identify changes that can be made to the devices.

The committee also plans to hold an infusion device summit and technology conference Oct. 5-6 at a location yet to be determined to discuss the issue with manufacturers, regulators, device users and health care professionals. For more information, visit www.aami.org.

This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Materials Management in Health Care.

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