"It is a great honor for us to receive this privileged award. We believe this award will allow us to achieve our goal, which is to make a positive contribution to medication safety research by improving infusion therapy safety in a neonatal care setting,” Schnock said. “We hope this study will improve the knowledge base related to IV medication errors in NICUs and that these identified errors will allow us to discover areas that require further focus and potential strategies to improve medication safety in NICUs.”

Developing an Algorithm to Detect Potentially Harmful Dosing Errors
Another pediatric patient safety challenge is inaccurate body weight data. This issue is significant because of the frequent use of weight-based dosing of medications and errors propagated by electronic health record (EHR) systems.
“In a pediatric environment, where many medication doses are based on weight, a medication error is possible if a wrong weight is entered for a patient. Yet, kids with severe conditions can have unusual growth patterns, so automated identification of weight errors is difficult,” said Danny T.Y. Wu, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “We have developed a computerized medication safety system that can detect weight errors and stop the medication ordering process to prevent errors, but at this point we need to improve the system’s positive predictive value.”

Wu and his research team were awarded $40,000 by the AAMI Foundation to help conduct this additional research.

“This grant will allow us to develop and evaluate a machine learning algorithm to more accurately detect pediatric weight entry errors, bringing our machine learning expertise to bear on this deceptively complex problem. We plan to conduct a pilot test to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm,” Wu said. “In the long term, we hope this work will help other pediatric health institutions reduce medication errors and improve patient safety.”

Applications for the AAMI Foundation’s next grant cycle are due by Dec. 31, and the awards will be made in June 2019.


About AAMI
AAMI is a nonprofit organization founded in 1967. It is a diverse community of approximately 7,000 healthcare technology professionals united by one important mission—supporting the healthcare community in the development, management, and use of safe and effective healthcare technology.

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