To err is human, and that’s why the staff at Mercy Medical Center is finding the hospital’s new “smart pump” intravenous system to be divine.

The new system, which Mercy began using on Aug. 15, replaces a standard IV system with a computerized system designed to assist nurses in ensuring that patients are given the correct medicines in the proper dosages. Mercy officials say they’re the first hospital in Iowa to purchase a system with this advanced level of patient safeguards, which represents an investment of several million dollars.

“This is the Cadillac or the Lexus,” said Mary Beth Gross, manager of Mercy’s Pharmacy Department, who spent 16-hour days this summer leading the effort to program in the 970 medications contained in the system’s pharmaceutical “libraries.”

Next month, the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics plan to begin using a smart pump IV system made by Harvard PCA, which also uses a drug library.

Mercy’s choice, the Alaris System made by San Diego-based Cardinal Health Inc., is the latest in a series of technological upgrades the hospital has made in the pharmaceutical arena. About three years ago, Mercy adopted a robotic system that dispenses all inpatient medications within its facilities. Within the next three years, it plans to implement a bar-coding identification system to further ensure patients are correctly matched with medications that are ordered.

“We look at the smart pumps as one part of the patient safety program,” said Mary Brown, Mercy’s patient safety officer.

As a nurse is setting up the IV, the smart pump prompts the nurse to remember particular actions required for the medication, such as whether a filter needs to be installed. It also warns the nurse if preset minimum or maximum doses or rates have accidentally been exceeded.

“So it provides a series of checks and balances as you’re setting up the pump,” Brown said. “Prior to this, you would just have your pump, and you would program in your rate and the volume to be infused. There was no cross-checking to see if you had the right concentration, or (other prompts to remind the nurse to take particular steps),” she said.

Each department of the hospital, whether it’s pediatrics or obstetrics, has its own library of medications programmed in so that nurses can find them with just a few keystrokes.

Mercy’s nursing staff received about 90 minutes of computer-based training on how to use the devices, followed by about a half-hour in a practice lab, Brown said. Though the safety features can be manually overridden in an emergency, “we discourage that, because we know when people are acting quickly, they are prone to error,” Brown said. “A skilled nurse can set it up within 30 to 40 seconds, and at the bottom of the drug library is a listing of all the emergency resuscitation drugs. So it’s made very easy for them to use this, even during emergencies, and that’s the intent.”

Mercy officials will also be able to analyze keystrokes from any of the 640 devices in use to determine the types of errors that are being caught, she said.

“That will be very helpful to us to understand how to improve the safety features that could be further programmed,” she said.

The smart pump systems will continue to evolve with even better technology for patient safety, said Steven Nelson, associate director of the pharmacy department at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

“What the manufacturers are doing is starting to incorporate bar codes into the systems, so that you scan the drug to bring up the drug entry so the nurse doesn’t have the opportunity to select the wrong drug,” he said. “We’re also looking at pumps that have an even more advanced function, allowing you to download patient information to the pump from the hospital’s information system.”

Manufacturers are also designing systems that will allow a hospital to view the status of its entire fleet of pumps on one computer screen, which will help hospital administrators boost efficiency, Nelson said.

“These infusion pumps have been in use for 25 or 30 years, but they were stand-alone devices that didn’t talk to anything else. Now, they’re being brought into the system.”