Infusion Pump Reliability and Usability: Veteran’s Health Administration Examines Differences Between Manufacturers

Through recent efforts aimed toward standardization of nomenclature for medical devices, the Veteran’s Health Administration is now able to leverage a large set of equipment histories to investigate the reliability and usability of particular devices. This type of analysis led to the realization of obvious distinctions between the 4 major manufacturers of infusion pumps, both in failure and use error rates. More importantly, cost and time burdens associated with these failures and errors were calculated, and these numbers show the possible savings associated with using reliability and usability data as a contributing factor in medical equipment acquisitions.