For the past several years, major healthcare agencies and advocates have laid the groundwork for broader utilization of continuous clinical surveillance to identify emerging and preventable threats to patient safety.

Continuous Clinical Surveillance: A Business and Clinical Case for Creating the Foundation for Real-Time Healthcare leverages peer-reviewed research, literature reviews, market analysis and use cases to demonstrate how this capability can help clinical teams to anticipate the early signs of patient decline including serious hospital-acquired conditions, such as opioid-induced respiratory depression and sepsis.

Though continuous clinical surveillance is regularly deployed in ICUs, there is a powerful case to be made that this capability should be scaled to other departments, such as MED-SURG, critical care, step-down and telemetry. More than a patient safety measure, continuous clinical surveillance is a viable and sustainable solution for the negative costs associated:

• Resource utilization
• Emergency transfers to intensive care units (ICUs)
• Length of stay
• Hospital readmissions

Safely surveilling high-risk populations across the enterprise and decreasing utilization of more expensive beds could provide significant cost savings for the institution and a more accurate and timely channel for clinical decision support regarding imminent, tractable problems.