Clinical Surveillance for patient deterioration in hospitals

Patient deterioration risks lives and raises costs

Nearly half of all adverse events in hospitalized patients occur on the general ward¹. However, in contrast to the continuous patient monitoring in ICUs, current ward monitoring protocols typically consist of intermittent spot checks by a nurse every 4-8 hours². Without more frequent checks of the patient’s status that can prompt earlier warnings of patient deterioration, patient lives and outcomes are put at risk. Cost of care can also be impacted with the resulting severe adverse patient safety events, ICU bounce-backs and increased length of stay. 

The earlier patient deterioration is detected the better for all. However, the signs are hard for clinicians to detect when they are managing multiple patients and lack the clinical context of the patient deterioration.

Clinical Surveillance software 

With an integrated, score-based clinical surveillance tool, caregivers get invaluable help in detecting deterioration in a patient's medical condition – in general wards, emergency departments or even at home using wearables. When there are signs of deterioration, clinicians are alerted as early as possible.

Ascom’s Clinical Surveillance solution for General Care units automatically visualizes vital signs collected from continuous and spot-check monitors, telemetry, wearable devices and manual inputs. It calculates your hospital’s choice of clinical surveillance scores continuously and sends proactive early warnings to the clinical team to help the decision-making process. It provides a single view by contextualizing data from various devices. The solution also features a configurable rules engine that can be configured to support the adoption of clinical  best-practice standards. 

How the Clinical Surveillance solution works - Patient surveillance on the general ward