Protocolization of analgesia and sedation through smart technology in intensive care: improving patient safety.
High-alert medications can cause serious patient harm if administered incorrectly. This article describes a quality improvement project to reduce medication errors involving high-alert sedative and analgesic medications in the intensive care unit (ICU) through use of protocolized and centralized smart intravenous infusion pump technology. Use of the protocolized software led to the interception of nearly 400 infusion-related programming errors.