Pain Management and Fetal Monitoring: Chasing a baby can start even before the delivery.
Patients in labor have many pain management options available to them. Many choose to remain as natural as possible, utilizing ambulation, positioning, counterpressure, hot showers/tubs, or even meditation. Others choose intravenous pain medications or an epidural.
The Modifiable Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS): We’ve come a long way baby!
Today, health care providers are serving more patients with increasedcomplex needs. When there are just too few nurses and heavier patient assignments, it is almost impossible to have eyes on all the patient data and determine what information is predictive of potential clinical deterioration.
Lifting the Burden and Enhancing our Care
Today's bedside healthcare professionals are faced with extraordinary challenges: Responding to events of clinical deterioration; managing an increasingly complex patient mix; increased work intensity; and reduced staffing. This overwhelming burden can be significantly lightened with the advances in technology that provide acuity assessments and early detection of clinical deterioration.
Assessing Lung Function and Cardiac Output with Capnography
Capnography has the unique ability to aid clinicians in assessing both ventilation and blood flow. It can, along with oximetry and arterial blood gases, provide both a basic and advanced assessment of pulmonary function. In this program, a review of the physiology that allows PetCO2 and SpO2 to monitor ventilation, perfusion and lung function is presented. The emphasis in this program is using capnography to assess lung function, prevent errors (such as oversedation) and monitor cardiac output. The use of these two technologies can be argued to be the most important techniques in assessing lung function, particularly in the COVID environment.
The Technology Trip Fantastic: Monitoring Patients Today and Tomorrow!
Whatever technology carrier you and your system were riding in December of 2019, the technology journey today is an accelerated rocket ride into the future. COVID 19, staffing shortages, the imbalance between the numbers and levels of providers and high-acuity patients, and the digital evolution is changing today’s practice for better and for worse. How we can use all of these factors to develop and support our future practice, facilitate early and rapid identification of patients-at-risk and give us precious time back for the simple moments of human caring may be unveiled in the future of technology and the fuel that moves us forward. Let’s get ready for the ride! Join us in this thought-provoking look to the past, present and future of technological advances that keep patients safer and staff more fulfilled.
A Fresh Perspective on Traditional Clinical Monitoring
Clinical monitoring is one of the primary ways that clinicians continuously observe trends in patients baseline health and response to treatment. In order to ensure accuracy of the data derived from the monitors attached to our patients that clinicians heavily rely upon, the placement of these monitoring leads is crucial. Melding the technology requirements with the needs of our patients, will lead to optimization of monitoring. Through case studies, you will learn the common pitfalls in monitoring and strategies to improve outcomes.
Advanced Pulmonary Assessment Use of Capnography and Oximetry: Beyond the Basics
Capnography has the unique ability to aid clinicians in assessing both ventilation and blood flow. Oximetry can identify threats to pulmonary function. In this webinar, a review of the physiology that allows PetCO2 and SpO2 to monitor ventilation, perfusion and lung function is presented. The emphasis in this webinar is using capnography to prevent over-sedation and monitoring of blood flow, while oximetry is used to warn of impending respiratory dysfunction. The use of these two technologies can be argued to be the most important vital signs available to the nurse and respiratory therapist.
Assessing Ventilation and Blood flow with Capnography
Capnography has the unique ability to aid clinicians in assessing both ventilation and blood flow. In this program, a review of the physiology that allows exhaled CO2 to monitor ventilation and perfusion is presented. The emphasis in this program is using capnography to prevent over-sedation and monitoring of blood flow. Due to the ability to assess both ventilation and perfusion, capnography has been called the “15 second vital sign”. In the midst of the pandemic, capnography has shown to detect severe respiratory failure (hypercarbia) and pulmonary emboli due to the clotting disorders in COVID. Actual clinical patient examples are used to illustrate the value of capnography in patient assessment. The use of capnography is likely to continue to grow throughout the hospital, outpatient and pre-hospital settings.
The Deadly Deterioration: Surveilling sepsis and COVID-19
Despite updated telemetry standards published in 2017 by the American Heart Association, there are still many aspects of telemetry that have not been addressed nor studied to truly determine what improves outcomes. In 2020, the Veterans Health Administration, representing the largest health care organization in the world, released a comprehensive guidebook for telemetry. This webinar will review the key content in this guidebook focusing on implementation of evidenced-based best practices.
Pulse Oximetry: A Necessary Tool in the Covid-19 Pandemic
Patients with Covid-19 require close, continuous monitoring of oxygenation. With desaturation, a certain percentage of patients will require supplemental oxygen, and others can advance quickly to high flow oxygen therapy or mechanical ventilation. The arterial blood gas test is the gold standard for measuring oxygenation, however it is an invasive procedure, and not a continuous monitoring option. Pulse oximetry can provide continuous measurement of blood oxygen levels. In this webinar, evidence will be presented to ensure the SPO2 data is reliable, and if questionable, we will discuss which other probe placement sites can provide more sustainable results, and when this modality may need to be discontinued.
Intra-Hospital Transport of Critically Ill Patients: How to Keep Them Safe
Transporting a critically ill patient within the hospital is common because of the need for advanced diagnostics and procedures. There are potential challenges associated with intra-hospital transport and patient safety is of the utmost importance. The standard for intra-hospital transport is to provide the same level of care requiring connected physiological monitoring as within the ICU. This webinar will identify the risks and provide a workable framework to ensure patient safety. Strategies include stakeholder engagement, benefits of standardization, wireless assessment and testing to ensure alarms, trends and waveform will continue be tracked and integrated. The webinar will explore the current literature along with case studies to illustrate the challenges and best practices.
Patient-Centric Monitoring: Using Technology to Enhance Patient Care.
Maintaining a patient-centered vision while implementing new monitoring technology is a complex endeavor, and the intended benefits of technology are not always realized because of implementation-related challenges. This webinar will describe how an academic medical center successfully addressed cultural, educational barriers in the successful implementation of a physiologic monitoring strategy.
COVID-19 Clinical Deterioration outside the ICU: Prediction, Detection, and Escalation
Since March 2020, CDC data indicates that more than 1 million people in the US have been infected by COVID-19. Hospitals in various parts of the US continue to face shortages in ICU bed capacity and staff. The diversity in clinical presentation and the potential for rapid deterioration requires effective surveillance of inpatients not presently requiring critical care support.
Consistent and Reliable Pulse Oximetry: It really is more than just applying a probe
This clinical discussion of pulse oximetry will cover the background, basics and nuances of pulse oximetry monitoring in critical and acute care hospital settings with the goal of helping caregivers build a mental model of the technology and physiology used in pulse oximetry. The webinar will also focus on common clinical conditions that lead to diminished blood flow to the digits and slower detection of saturation changes, including patient shock, peripheral vascular disease, advanced age, etc. Tips on how to troubleshoot and/or optimize pulse oximeter performance will be shared and pulse oximetry probe site options beyond the finger will be discussed