Say goodbye to those exhausting night shifts!
Anyone who has ever spent a night in a hospital setting is well aware of how each night patients must be woken up by health care workers to take their vitals. This not only distressing for health care professionals collecting the data, but even for the patients which results in stress, lack of sleep, irritability, and even hypertension. Research suggests that 1/3rd of the time, at a night shift, is spent just collecting and noting down vitals, but now we might finally have a solution to those overworking nights. A team of researchers led by Theodoros Zanos has developed a tool that uses AI to predict overnight instability leading to a decrease in the number of vital checks during the night. The AI used information collected from approximately 2.3 million patients admitted to the hospital from 2012 to 2019. The AI was trained to use 5 parameters which included respiratory rate, heart rate, systolic blood pressure, body temperature, and patient's age, and a calculated risk score (Modified Early Warning Score) to assess whether the patient should be left to sleep or woken up for vital assessment overnight. The results from the AI are remarkable with only 2 errors in 10,000 patients and even these 2 patients were borderline unstable and showed no trend. This is a great step forward and can lead to less exhaustion in health care workers. It will result in fewer cases of a lapse in judgment due to over-working, which can have devastating results for the patients. References:- 1. Tóth, V., Meytlis, M., Barnaby, D.P. et al. Let Sleeping Patients Lie, avoiding unnecessary overnight vitals monitoring using a clinically based deep-learning model. npj Digit. Med. 3, 149 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-020-00355-7
