Wireless clinical alerts for critical medication, laboratory and physiologic data

Clinical information systems (CIS) are increasingly employed to manage the information associated with hospital and Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients. CIS are typically interfaced to a variety of other systems which provide bedside physiologic data, laboratory results and medication information for video displays and reports. However, having all this information together in electronic format provides an opportunity to detect critically adverse patient conditions, which may be complex. The authors have devised a software system which extracts all pertinent information from the CIS on a continuous basis and sends the data through a series of event detection algorithms. These algorithms are configured to detect critically abnormal physiologic and laboratory values, critical trends and critical indicators of drug reactions and side effects. Once an alert is detected, the software system codes it into a readable alphanumeric alert message and automatically sends it to a commercial paging system. Alerts are received on pagers carried by designated physicians and pharmacists who can take immediate actions to reverse the alert condition.