Short Peripheral Catheter Quality and Economics: The Intravenous Quotient.

Peripheral intravenous therapy is an established therapy with known complications and failures. The burden of the cost of unsuccessful short peripheral catheter (SPC) placement and maintenance is not always clearly identified. This often-obscured cost of poor quality needs to be defined and addressed. The scope of the problem is defined here, and a metric that can be applied to measure the magnitude of the problem and identify targets for focused improvement initiatives that would improve the quality of infusion therapy using SPCs is proposed.