Remote heart monitoring can help detect emergencies

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) – Instead of having heart monitors with noisy alarms near patients’ beds in the hospital, it might be better to have off-site technicians do the heart monitoring remotely, a recent study suggests. Traditional on-site heart monitoring can involve a lot of false alarms that don’t always help detect cardiac arrests and other serious events, said lead study author Dr. David Cantillon, a researcher at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. “Important warning signs are often missed among a large volume of nuisance alarms,” Cantillon said by email.  “This is referred to as alarm fatigue, and this has been associated with serious adverse outcomes, including patient deaths across the United States.” As an alternative, Cantillon and colleagues examined outcomes for more than 99,000 heart patients at the Cleveland Clinic and three nearby regional hospitals who were monitored remotely.