An intravenous medication safety system: preventing high-risk medication errors at the point of care.

Improving medication safety at the point of care--particularly for high-risk drugs--is a major concern of nursing administrators. The medication errors most likely to cause harm are administration errors related to infusion of high-risk medications. An intravenous medication safety system is designed to prevent high-risk infusion medication errors and to capture continuous quality improvement data for best practice improvement. Initial testing with 50 systems in 2 units at Vanderbilt University Medical Center revealed that, even in the presence of a fully mature computerized prescriber order-entry system, the new safety system averted 99 potential infusion errors in 8 months.