Air medical journal
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Air medical journal · Jan 2014
Comparative StudyIdentification of dynamic prehospital changes with continuous vital signs acquisition.
In most trauma registries, prehospital trauma data are often missing or unreliable because of the difficult dual task consigned to prehospital providers of recording vital signs and simultaneously resuscitating patients. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that the analysis of continuous vital signs acquired automatically, without prehospital provider input, improves vital signs data quality, captures more extreme values that might be missed with conventional human data recording, and changes Trauma Injury Severity Scores compared with retrospectively compiled prehospital trauma registry data. ⋯ Real-time continuous vital signs monitoring and data acquisition can identify dynamic prehospital changes, which may be missed compared with vital signs recorded manually during distinct prehospital intervals. In the future, the use of automated vital signs trending may improve the quality of data reported for inclusion in trauma registries. These data may be used to develop improved triage algorithms aimed at optimizing resource use and enhancing patient outcomes.