Design of a Novel Multifunction Decision Support Display for Anesthesia Care: AlertWatch® OR

BMC Anesthesiology

Table 1 Text Alerts During One Week of Cases at University of Michigan ORs: 1755 cases

	Alerts	Alerts/Case	Alerts/Hour of Anesthesia
Total	5970	3.4	1.7
Documentation/Billing	1568	0.9	0.45
Clinical Alerts:	4402	2.5	1.25
Drugs/Antibiotics/Neuromuscular Blocker/ Train-of-Four	668	0.38	0.8
Glucose High/Low	118	0.07
Cardiac	470	0.26	0.13
Blood Pressure	2466	1.4	0.7
Ventilation	589	0.3	0.15
Red Scrolling Text/Beeping Tone/Paging:	314	0.2	0.01
Glucose < 60 ml/dl	2	0.18
HCT < 18%	9	0.01
MAP < 55 mmHg (> 10 min)	303	0.17	0.08

Legend: Above are the total number of text alerts triggered by AlertWatch OR during seven days at the University of Michigan operating rooms. The total alerts at the top are 5970 alerts were triggered in 1755 cases. They are subdivided into documentation and billing alerts (the largest number, 1568) drug alerts, and physiologic alerts. At the bottom, the highest risk alerts, which are associated with scrolling red text and a beep tone or a page, are for low glucose, low hematocrit or mean blood pressure below 55 mmHg for more than 10 min. The most common of these serious alerts was for hypotension. AlertWatch® OR stores no clinical data. It only stores alerts for quality assurance purposes which are not part of the medical record

ISSN: 1471-2253