“In the past, when getting an IV drip, we had to keep watching how much fluid was left, and when it was almost finished, we had to press the call bell or go find a nurse. If I was accompanying a family member, I didn’t even dare go to the restroom when the drip was nearly empty.” After saying this, Ms. Zhang, a patient’s family member, pointed to a small white device on the IV pole beside the bed and said this little white thing is amazing—there is no need to press the call bell during infusion, and the nurse comes to the bedside in advance when the infusion is about to finish.
The fully closed-loop intelligent infusion management system launched by Shenzhen Second People’s Hospital uses a small white device mounted on the IV pole—the infusion monitor—to accurately monitor the remaining fluid volume and the infusion drip rate. Nurses do not need to make repeated rounds to check the progress of infusions; they can remotely view changes in infusion status at the nurse station via a large TV screen or a smart handheld terminal (PDA).
Intelligent Monitoring: Reassuring for Patients and Less Burdensome for Nurses
In the geriatric medicine ward on the 22nd floor of the Surgical Building, nurses have a heavy daily infusion workload.
“Every day from morning to night, we are on edge, worried that failing to change a patient’s fluids or remove the needle in time might cause patient dissatisfaction,” a nurse said during the conversation.
Using intelligent technology to help nurses safeguard patients not only greatly reduces nurses’ psychological pressure, but also greatly enhances patients’ sense of safety during infusion. In the past, when a patient’s infusion was almost finished, they would press the bedside call bell. The endless ringing made it hard for us to respond in time and also disturbed patients who needed quiet rest. With this intelligent infusion system, the ward has become quieter and infusion care is more orderly.
At night, patients and their families do not pay as much attention to the infusion as they do during the day. This system enables real-time monitoring, ensuring the safety of patients’ infusion. This is also something they find more reassuring.
Early Awareness of Infusion Abnormalities for Timely Handling
During infusion, it is common for patients and family members to adjust the infusion drip rate without authorization. In fact, such behavior can easily cause adverse reactions. For ordinary drugs, the clinical infusion rate should be maintained at 40–60 drops per minute. If the infusion is too fast, it can cause cardiac arrest, respiratory failure, or other serious consequences.
On the large screen at the nurse station, the remaining fluid volume and drip rate for each patient’s infusion can be displayed in real time. If a patient’s infusion drip rate exceeds the preset range, the drip rate display turns red and highlighted, and an alert sound is triggered. In addition, nurses can receive real-time alert information on the smart handheld terminal (PDA) they carry, so they can know the patient’s infusion status anytime and anywhere.
Fully Closed-Loop and Traceable, Ensuring Infusion Safety
Before infusion begins, the nurse scans the patient’s wristband worn at admission to confirm the patient’s identity, scans the QR code on the infusion bag for verification and execution, and hangs the infusion bag on the hook of the infusion monitor. No button operation is required; the device automatically detects the infusion bag specifications and starts remote monitoring of the infusion. The system is seamlessly connected with the hospital’s information system, so every step performed by the nurse is synchronized with backend data, ensuring that every step of the infusion is traceable.
Medical safety concerns every patient’s life. Non-standardized processes and manual verification methods can lead to errors. The system optimizes the infusion process, and every step of the nurse’s operation is carried out through information-based means. This not only follows the five “R” principles for medication during infusion—the right patient, at the right place and time, at the right rate, receiving the right drug—but also enables nurses to remove the needle for the right patient at the right time, keep abreast of real-time changes in the patient’s infusion, and ensure patient safety and information traceability.
Patient safety and quality of care are hard indicators of a hospital’s service level. Patient safety management is a key concern for all medical institutions, and how to rationally allocate hospital human resources and design a more scientific and effective management model is an even more difficult problem that nursing management hopes to solve.
The fully closed-loop intelligent infusion management system is not only a safety guarantee during the infusion process; its information traceability and integration functions also provide data support for hospital operations management. By collecting and integrating data on infusion patients, workload, drug use, alerts, and other information, the system automatically generates multiple types of charts and curves. This allows nursing management to use the data as a basis to more intuitively see whether human resource investment in infusion management is reasonable and which aspects infusion problems are mainly concentrated in, thereby enabling targeted continuous improvement and continuously enhancing the quality of nursing services.
