Updated June 08, 2015.
While I've described elsewhere what an electronic vitals documentation system is, in "A Product in Focus - Welch Allyn Connex® Electronic Vitals Documentation System", let's explore why automated and electronic vital signs documentation and interface with the electronic medical record can improve care.
Access to accurate patient vital signs is essential for medical staff. These data are typically the evidence used to make decisions in diagnosis and treatment regimens, patterns of care, and urgency or triage.
Furthermore, vital signs are influential in the decision to move a patient to higher or lower acuity units. Vital signs also inform decisions about whether to discharge a patient, or instead keep them admitted to the hospital for further treatment and observation.
So, clearly, the delivery of sound medical care depends on the foundation of vital signs. Accurate and accessible vital signs.
Here's the concern: The average 200-bed hospital endures 10,000 errors associated with vital sign documentation mistakes each year.
I've written nearly 100 articles on medicalsupplies.D106 that describe the danger and the cost, paid both in human life as well as dollars, of waste initiated by medical errors. Human errors are caused by noise issues, lack of sleep, stress, poor or misunderstood cleaning efforts, healthcare-acquired infections, and disorganized storage methods. It's a big deal, because rather than fix these inherent problems, and make the healthcare delivery system more efficient, the United States' Executive and Legislative Branches of government have chosen to exacerbate the expense of these problems by merely, and ineffectively, writing laws that ignore the fixable issues at hand.
This is akin to trying to over-medicate a child that can't focus in school rather than first ensuring that the student is getting enough regular sleep, eating a consistently healthy diet, and making time almost every day for some form of exercise or physical play. If those three foundations of a healthy lifestyle for the child aren't set in place first, then one jumps over these fundamentals by going straight for the prescription medication to fix what any parent ought to be able to fix with a little bit of attention to the basics of nurturing the mental and physical development of a growing human being. This is classic efficiency. Fix what you can control first. Maximize your current parameters and conditions. Once you've taken those as close to perfection as you can, then you can start adding layers of extra efforts such as prescription medicine in this example of the child who cannot focus in school, or legislation in the example of government trying to intervene so that more people have access to better, safer, and less expensive care.
Maximize the basics first. Then, and only then, add on the layers.
Electronic Vitals Documentation Can Help Maximize the Fundamentals
Although I'm not suggesting an electronic vitals documentation system will "fix healthcare" all by itself, I do argue that it has earned a place in the strategy. An end to end system like Welch Allyn's Connex Electronic Vitals Documentation System automates vital sign recordings, which saves 8,000 staff hours and $250,000 in lost productivity annually compared to manual documentation of vitals. And those numbers are just the savings for our "average 200-bed hospital". Imagine the savings that can be extrapolated annually if these back-to-basics improvements could be replicated across 1,000 hospitals in the United States. Then we're talking about some real numbers that generate massive savings, freeing up budgets for treating more patients that can't afford insurance, capital improvements, technology investments, medical research, and job creation. Fewer errors in transcribing vital signs, and then transmitting them to an electronic medical record for the entire health care team to access from virtually anywhere in their safety encrypted IT system, means better quality care. Patient lives are saved, medical errors decrease, and health care quality and outcomes data improves. New legislation, and their costly encumbrances such as Congressional gridlock, become a moot point.
I love it when our medical supplies community can resolve issues with ingenuity. We should be proud of what we do and the contribution we make to public health.
Sources
- Computers, Informatics, Nursing: September / October 2009, Volume 27, Issue 5, pages 318-323, "Connected Care: Reducing Errors Through Automated Vital Signs Data Upload."
- Automated Vital Sign Documentation for Medical Surgical Units: "Saving Time and Increasing Accuracy: Fact or Fairytale?"
- Vital signs measurement frequency estimates from "Lippincott's Textbook for Nursing Assistants: A Humanistic Approach to Caregiving."