Imagine that you are a cardiologist on call. You are at home, just winding down at 11:45 PM when you receive a call from a nurse on the telemetry unit, who reports that a patient who is three days post coronary artery bypass surgery has developed new onset atrial fibrillation. This is particularly concerning because the patient is reportedly on sotalol prophylaxis.
What is going through your mind? Can you trust this person’s interpretive clinical judgment? Is there additional information that would be helpful if only you had immediate access? Perhaps the current lab values, such as magnesium level? As you consider the differential diagnoses you are probably worried that this could be a sign of clinical deterioration. Myocardial infarction? Heart failure? Bleeding?
The nurse asks, “What should I do”? You are trying to determine the best course of action for this patient given their clinical situation – and while trusting the nurses’ assessment, or waiting until rounds the next morning, or heading back to the hospital are all options – none of these are ideal.
With AirStrip – PATIENT MONITORING, you have mobile, anytime, anywhere access to vital clinical data – including waveforms in real time – that will allow you to SEE important information, presented in a meaningful way for clinicians. In seconds you identify that, in fact, this is not atrial fibrillation – it is simply a rhythm with irregular R-R intervals - the patient is having flutter with variable atrioventricular conduction. It’s understandable that this could be viewed as atrial fibrillation by someone with less clinical experience.
This is just one of hundreds of clinical scenarios that happen thousands of times in hospitals across the globe every day. It’s all in what you SEE that matters. With a few taps of a button on your smart phone, you have overcome obstacles to data access and data sharing, you’ve improved communication among the members of the treatment team, and you facilitated more accurate, timely, and targeted treatment for this patient. And you’ll sleep better tonight. Great things can happen with mobility.
