Leveraging Smart Pump Event Log Data to Understand Medication Events

High-reliability organizations (HROs) embody 5 specific principles with the intent of improving safety and quality in complex, high-risk environments. When applying a high-reliability mindset within a health care system, medication safety exemplifies a complex process that warrants significant attention. Specifically, intravenous medication administration is a multi-step process that necessitates clinician-device interaction to identify and/or mitigate errors. Detailed intravenous smart pump operations are stored in the form of event logs. These event logs have potential to increase patient safety but lack usability in their original format. No methodological papers have been published that provide specific information on how to obtain and transform event log data into a user-friendly format. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to describe a specific process for transforming intravenous smart pump event log data into a user-friendly format. The process for transforming event log data is described in 2 phases and specific programming code is provided in 6 Supplementary files. Examples of event log data utilization are provided. Given that event log data can assist by providing objective information derived directly from the point of care, this guide is intended to foster innovations in patient safety using a high-reliability lens.