From the May 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
The case for continuous monitoring
To provide the best care for patients, we must leverage all the skills, knowledge and capabilities of our doctors and nurses, and equip them with the best tools to help them succeed in their roles.
However, with the vast majority of health staff using traditional manual patient monitoring methods, our doctors don’t have the real-time data and information necessary to best care for their patients. By relying on information collected every 4-6 hours, they are constantly playing catch-up instead of being ahead of the game, and therefore need to spend significant time dealing with patient crises rather than preventing them from occurring. In addition, when manually checking patients, staff may miss small but important changes or irregularities to baseline vital signs that do not always manifest in manual checks alone - while advanced algorithms based on continuous data can provide early detection of these irregularities - which may prove to be potentially dangerous for patients.
This is where continuous monitoring comes in. Leveraging advanced health technologies and predictive analytics, continuous monitoring brings patient monitoring to the 21st century. Continuous monitoring systems collect tens of thousands of patient vital readings a day, painting a complete picture of the patient’s condition and trends, to enable clinicians to ‘predict the future’ and stratify patients into risk groups. In this way, staff can focus on the patients that need their attention most, while knowing that reliable monitors are not only keeping watch over their other patients, but also alerting them to significant changes in patient condition. Medically documented examples of adverse events that have been prevented via continuous monitoring alerts include pressure ulcers, patient falls and code-blue events as a result of cardiac or respiratory arrest.
Another advantage of continuous monitoring is the psychological effect on both health staff and patients. With access to accurate real-time patient data, health teams have the tools to support their decisions and don’t need to hesitate before calling a physician, as all of the supporting data are clearly available. On the patient side, continuous monitoring removes the “white coat effect”, the documented fluctuation of patient vitals when undergoing manual checks. By utilizing continuous monitoring, clinicians can accurately view patient vitals from a distance, see trends in real time, and prevent the alarm fatigue associated with manual measurements.
