Page 40 - BusinessWest July 7, 2025

“By bringing
together expertise
from both nursing
and engineering,
we are breaking
barriers and
reimagining how
technology can
support nurses
and improve
patient care.”
Combining Expertise
UMass Amherst Team Honored for Inventing Safer IV Pole
A nurse-engineer team at UMass Amherst has been honored
with an ANA Innovation Award for inventing a new intrave-
nous (IV) pole designed to improve the safety and ease of
administering IV medications at the hospital bedside.
The American Nurses Assoc. Foundation and the American
Nurses Enterprise announced the 2025 award winners earlier this
year. The team — Karen Giuliano, nursing co-director of the Elaine
Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation; Jeannine
Blake, assistant professor of Nursing; and Juan Jiménez, associate
professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and a Manning/
IALS innovation fellow — won honorable mention in the 2025 Team
Innovation Award category.
Preventable medication errors harm approximately 500,000
hospitalized patients in the U.S. each year. Many of these errors
occur with the use of IV smart pumps, which require a very specific
system setup to ensure the right amount of medication is delivered
as ordered. When the setup is not followed, the IV smart pump can
deliver too much or too little of the medication prescribed, even as
the pump signals it is delivering the correct amount.
By combining the engineering and fluid dynamics expertise of
Jiménez with the clinical knowledge of critical care nurses Giuliano
and Blake, this interdisciplinary team set out to develop an IV pole
that simplifies and accelerates the setup and delivery of IV medica-
tions in hospitals when using an IV pump, ultimately reducing the
occurrence of dangerous yet largely preventable medication errors.
The idea stemmed from real-world clinical observations, which
revealed that standard IV poles
often make it more challenging
and time-consuming for front-
UMass
Continued on page 41 >>
line nurses to achieve optimal
Karen Giuliano with an IV pole.
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