MedEd Bytes series:

MedEd Bytes is a video series that offers a quick and digestible learning format that can help solidify your understanding of different therapies leveraged in patient monitoring and respiratory interventions. In this series, we’ll cover topics such as capnography waveforms, the technology behind pulse oximetry, modes of ventilation, and more. To stay up to date with the series, please subscribe to our YouTube channel or start watching the series below.

Remote wearable monitoring

Optimizing workflow is more important than ever with patient safety concerns and staffing shortages impacting hospitals all over the world. Intermittent monitoring can place a significant burden on healthcare staff and can also put patients at risk for unrecognized deterioration between vital sign assessments. Remote wearable monitoring and continuous monitoring may be able to help, and such technologies are associated with both reduced healthcare practitioner workload and improved patient outcomes.

In this MedEd Bytes series, we assess the challenges impacting hospitals and healthcare practitioners today and discuss how wearables, remote monitoring, and continuous monitoring can help.

Byte 1: Impacts of COVID-19 on healthcare workers

Two years of COVID-19 surges placed increasing stress on healthcare workers. Understanding and optimizing nursing workflow is essential to avoid overwork and burnout.

02:08
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Byte 2: Impacts of COVID-19 on patient safety

Pandemic-related strain on hospitals and individual healthcare providers (HCPs) has created a circumstance where clinical deterioration may go unnoticed. Lowering workloads and freeing up nursing time may reduce burnout and improve patient safety.

01:46
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Byte 3: The burden of intermittent monitoring

Intermittent monitoring and related manual documentation of patient vital signs places significant burden on healthcare staff. Technology can ease the workload burden associated with manual vital sign documentation while improving patient safety.

01:57
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Byte 4: The risk of infrequent vital sign assessments

Infrequent vital sign assessment puts patients at risk for unrecognized deterioration between vital sign assessments. We review some of the metrics associated with ICU re-admission.

02:06
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Byte 5: Detecting patient deterioration earlier

Early detection of patient deterioration can be critical to mitigating harm and is ultimately a fundamental purpose of patient monitoring.

02:00
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Byte 6: Preventing monitoring failures

The consequences of monitoring failures can be significant, and one contributing factor to monitoring failure is observations on the floor are limited to every four to six hours.

03:26
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Byte 7: Identifying patient deterioration with continuous remote monitoring

Compared to intermittent monitoring, continuous, remote, and/or wearable vital sign monitoring is associated with improved patient outcome and reduced HCP workload.

02:36
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Byte 8: Optimizing patient monitoring in low acuity environments

Remote monitoring systems have demonstrated the ability to provide highly actionable and timely notifications of patient deterioration without the workflow and alarm burden of ICU style monitoring.

03:22
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Byte 9: The value of respiratory rate monitoring

Despite being neglected clinically, respiratory rate often out-performs other vital signs as a predictor of adverse outcome.

02:17
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Byte 10: Using wearables for hospital and home monitoring

The ability of wearables to automatically send vital sign assessment and movement to the electronic medical record (EMR) can free up nursing staff.  Allowing nursing staff to spend more time with hands-on care.

01:59
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