AVATAR®: an electronic evidence-based medicine friendly tool for vascular access planning

In today's demanding healthcare setting, many patients who are referred to hospital for treatment require some form of intravascular access device to administer required therapies and medications. It is estimated that most of admissions have an intravascular device placed on arrival to any given facility. Often these treatment prerequisites, combined with a wide range of available devices, based upon a combination of patient assessments, necessitated treatment regimens, and the use of a decision algorithm to choose the most appropriate device that provides all the patient's needs, requires a logical and methodical approach during the decision-making process. Several criteria should always remain in high regard for patient and device considerations, such as overall need for a device, the type of drugs or medications being infused, duration of therapy, patient disease states and comorbidities, as well as vessel health, patient age, previous intravascular device history, patient preference, potential site(s) of implantation, and finally, the resources available for ongoing device management. We have developed a tool, called AVATAR, aimed to make easier the implementation of a vascular access planning. It is a newly-designed tool, developed for the clinicians that must decide which type of venous access device is the ideal one in each single patient. It utilizes existing information that may not necessarily be only used by experts, but mainly by any clinician who may be looking for assistance in determining patient requirements. It requires clinical knowledge and it is not designed to be used for determining vascular access choices in emergency situations.