I am looking to connect with others whose organizations have undergone or are in the process of planning for integration. My organization is pursuing this with Epic/Baxter, but I imagine a potential issue we are discussing is widely applicable.

My organization (UW Medicine) is soon going live with Alaris-Epic smart pump interoperability and we have been working through the concern raised in a recent ISMP Acute Care Safety Alert newsletter from 3/13/25. In brief, the issue was that a nurse mistakenly associated a medication-containing bag (amiodarone mixed in D5W) to an order for D5W because they scanned the manufacturer's barcode on the D5W bag and not the patient-specific label applied by the pharmacy. This resulted in the amiodarone infusing at the prescribed rate of D5W (much faster than intended).

Hello!
We are a large pediatric hospital currently preparing for Alaris-Epic interoperability.

Looking for guidance in the following:
1. Recommendations or insight to make our process towards interoperability more successful
2. The biggest struggles you had with aligning Guardrails and Epic ERX records
3. How to increase interoperability compliance to 95%

Any and all advice is truly appreciated!
Thank you!

Hi,

We are in the process of expanding our Epic/Alaris interoperability as much as possible. Right now, ED, PACU, and OR are out of scope. We have a plan to go live in the ED, but we were wondering if anyone uses interoperability in the OR/with anesthesia?
Our anesthesia team uses OpTime and one-step meds, so I'm not sure if that is something we can overcome or not.

If anyone has figured this out, I'd love to hear about your processes!

Thank you,
Kara Thornton
UVA Health
krp4h@uvahealth.org

Our system is currently in the process of consolidating 11 individual Alaris pump libraries into 1 system library. We still have independent IV administration guidelines that dictate areas in the hospital that certain medications can be given and monitoring along with it.

Have any of you consolidated your IV administration guidelines as a system? What parameters did you use to broadly define areas within the IV administration guideline that can be expanded to other hospitals or in times of high census where patients are in hallways.

We are evaluating the pros and cons of implementing infusion pumps with interoperability. If you have implemented this technology, please share the following:

1) What have been the pros of having interoperability of infusion pumps in your facility?

2) What are the cons or what downsides have you noticed post-implementation?

3) Has utilizing pumps with this technology increased safety in your organization?

4) What would you have done differently?

Thank you in advance for your input.

Question: How have hospitals worked around possible HIPAA violation issues when using the Patient ID function on smart pumps?

Background: We recently pursued a path to require RNs to enter the MR# in the Patient ID on our smart pumps (Alaris), but were stopped due to a concern over a possible HIPAA violation should a smart pump "go missing" (leave the hospital).

Other facilities who have interoperability (bidirectional communication between eMAR and the smart pump) would theoretically have the same issue.

We are in the process of implementing interoperability between smart pumps and EMR. During this process we have identified that our EMR is setup to have a dual verification for chemotherapy rate changes. This is not something that was forced before but when completing the pump rate verify it ask for each rate change to be dual verified.

The standards from ONS suggest a dual verification for initial pump programming but do not go into detail regarding rate changes. APON suggest a dual verification for initial pump programming and rate changes of chemotherapy.