15 Jul Hospital slashes false-positive diagnoses with CDS platform
Research points to ways to reduce incorrect assessments of patient conditions
Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC’s electronic surveillance framework for hospitalized kids is poised to significantly reduce false-positive identification of serious health conditions.
This according to new peer-reviewed research published today in the journal Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.
The retrospective study of 16,239 Children’s Hospital pediatric admissions between January 2006 and December 2013 compared the use of vital signs, a common indicator of patient condition, to that of PeraHealth’s Pediatric Rothman Index, or PRI.
PRI is a patient condition score that uses an algorithm composed of vital signs, lab tests and nurse assessments (skin issues, mental state) to identify patients requiring urgent intervention with pediatric ICU transfer.
The research, conducted by Children’s Hospital clinicians, found that use of vital signs alone led to false-positive identification of serious events 46 percent of the time. The PRI had a false-positive rate of just 1 percent.
“Many symptoms of serious pediatric conditions are also found in common conditions that do not require immediate intervention, and vital signs alone cannot discriminate between the two situations,” Robert Clark, MD, chief of pediatric critical care medicine at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, said in a news release announcing the finding. “Our research found the Pediatric Rothman Index to be a favorable electronic trigger for alerting clinicians to the need for rapid response teams, complementing the efforts of our nurses and physicians.”
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