| Title |
Best Practices in In-Hospital Monitoring: Interviews, Observations, and Data Review |
| Description |
The primary goals of the project are to define key characteristics of monitoring system design, evaluate the impact of these characteristics on monitoring quality, and establish minimum standards and recommended interventions to ensure effective patient monitoring. The specific objectives of this phase of the project include: 1) developing and validating a metric of in-hospital patient monitoring quality that allows comparison across diverse care settings and 2) defining characteristics of monitoring system design that are expected to influence monitoring effectiveness. |
| Notes |
Patient monitoring is consistently identified as a root cause in preventable in-hospital serious adverse events or deaths. Estimates suggest that about 5% of in-hospital deaths (about 15,000 per year in the US) are preventable based on current clinical standards and there is significant opportunity to improve on current standards through prevention, earlier detection, expanded monitoring, and increased speed of response. There is limited and conflicting evidence on best practices in patient monitoring. A variety of factors, such as whether primary responsibility for continuous cardiac monitoring is local (on the unit) or remote (by dedicated watchers), how events are communicated, how alarms are managed, how periodic surveillance is implemented, and training can impact the ability to recognize and respond to patient deterioration and emergent events. |
| Start Date |
11/01/2014 |
| Principal Name |
Melanie C. Wright, PhD |
| Contact Name |
Sydney Radcliffe |
| Phone |
208-367-2853 |
