As part of Abbott Laboratories' comprehensive initiative to reduce medication errors and enhance patient safety in hospitals, the company announced the launch of its Abbott Mednet drug library software at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Midyear Clinical Meeting. Mednet provides clinical decision rules designed to improve medication management at the hospital patient's bedside and may offer additional protection against intravenous (IV) medication errors.

The software works in conjunction with the company's Plum A+, an IV drug-delivery medication management system, and allows hospitals to define dose limits for up to 1,200 medications. The software also alerts clinicians if they have programmed a medication dose outside a set of predetermined limits established by the hospital. Introduced in 2000, the Plum A+ infusion system is a modular and scalable infusion therapy system for electronic control of IV medication administration. Plum technology is currently used in more than 1,000 hospitals in the United States.

Mednet is the only drug library software available that offers both "soft" and "hard" dose- and rate-setting limits for both primary and secondary infusion. Soft limits, which are currently the industry standard, allow clinicians to manually override dose limits if they require delivery of a larger or smaller dose than what is recommended by their hospital's best-practice guidelines. As an added safety feature, the Mednet drug library software also allows hospitals to set hard limits that staff cannot manually override.

"Mednet is a key component of our initiative to help enhance medication management, as well as patient and health care worker safety in hospitals," said John Arnott, vice president, hospital business sector, Abbott Laboratories. "This innovative software will give hospital caregivers access to the hospital's drug reference library and corresponding dose guidelines at the patient bedside. As one of the leading suppliers of infusion therapy products to the US hospital market, we will continue to expand our medication management systems, including new software products and drug-delivery devices."

With the Mednet drug library software, hospital pharmacists, working in collaboration with clinicians, can develop and program dose recommendations for up to 1,200 IV infusion drugs and fluids into a database. Clinicians can also customize clinical decision rules for up to 12 different clinical areas of the hospital, such as the intensive care unit, emergency department and pediatrics. The database is then loaded into the Plum A+ device, which is used to deliver medication at the patient bedside.

With the ability to capture and log all alarms and alerts generated from hospital caregiver programming outside of the recommended soft limits, Mednet will allow hospitals to identify trends in compliance with the hospital's dosing and clinical rules, as well as other quality assurance measures. If a hospital caregiver makes a device programming error, the system will provide a warning, signaling that the program is outside the recommended limits of the hospital's best practices and protocols. If the entry is outside of the hard limits, the system will prevent the hospital caregiver from programming the device.

A 1999 Institute of Medicine report, "To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System," said medical errors contribute to as many as 98,000 deaths in the United States each year – including 7,000 attributed to medication errors. The report also noted that medication errors account for one out of every 131 outpatients deaths, and one out of every 854 inpatient deaths.

"Our hospital is committed to continually enhancing the quality of care we provide to our patients," said James C McAllister III, MS, director of pharmacy, University of North Carolina Hospitals and Clinics. "Mednet drug library software will begin to fulfill a need to provide improved checks at the patient bedside to help ensure that medications are delivered in accordance with the best practices established by our hospital."

Abbott Laboratories is a global, broad-based health care company devoted to the discovery, development, manufacture and marketing of pharmaceuticals, nutritionals, and medical products, including devices and diagnostics. The company employs more than 70,000 people and markets its products in more than 130 countries. In 2002, the company's sales were $17.7 billion.