Continuous Monitoring on Hospital Wards

Continuous Monitoring on Hospital Wards

Source 《Health Management》  

The recent surge of hospitalised COVID-19 patients created both ICU bed and healthcare worker shortages, raising concerns regarding patient safety. Therefore, the adoption of remote monitoring systems, specifically designed for hospital wards, dramatically increased. These systems enable the continuous monitoring of vital signs, including SpO₂, in a large number of ward patients at the same time, display the information on a central station, and, in case of clinical deterioration, immediately alert nurses directly on their pager or cellphone (Michard et al. 2019). During epidemics, remote monitoring also has the advantage of decreasing the number of physical interactions and thereby the risk of virus transmission.

In a large study done in the medico-surgical wards of 360 US hospitals (Lyons et al. 2020) before the pandemic, over 20% of rapid response interventions were triggered by a decrease in SpO₂. On the wards, vital sign spot-checks are usually done every 4-8h and another study showed that because of the intermittent nature of SpO₂ measurements, nurses may miss up to 90% of hypoxaemic events (Sun et al. 2015). In this context, continuous pulse oximetry systems, able to inform nurses directly on their pager in case of clinical deterioration, have been shown to be useful to decrease the number of rescue interventions and ICU transfers. Continuous monitoring of SpO₂ and other vital signs was already on the rise before the pandemic, and is today, more than ever, considered as a major opportunity to improve patient safety (Vincent et al. 2018).

Dr. Frederic Michard writing