Department Blog

Posted 12/10/2019 by Deborah Stein

Knowing the likelihood of IV access failure can improve ED efficiency

Mike Witting, MD, Professor; Mak Moayedi, MD, CDEM, Assistant Professor; Jon Mark Hirshon, MD, MPH, FACEP, FAAEM, FACPM, Professor; and Steve Schenkel, MD, Associate Professor, all from the Department of Emergency Medicine, were among the authors of “Predicting Failure of Intravenous Access in Adults: The Value of Prior Difficulty” (full text available), which was published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine in July.

Their objective was to validate prior need for an advanced technique to establish intravenous access as a predictor of failure to achieve access via traditional methods and to estimate the risk difference associated with this finding. They found that patients with a prior need for advanced techniques were 14% more likely to have failure of intravenous access by traditional methods than those without prior difficulty.