Wellstar Case Study: Improved Patient Outcomes

Using Alert Prioritization to Maximize Cardiac Remote Patient Monitoring Outcomes

The amount of data shared by cardiac remote monitoring systems is vast — without alert prioritization help, it can be too much data for an already-busy clinic to easily process. In a study following the transmission volume produced by 26,000 remotely monitored device patients, only about 40% of transmissions were actionable, whereas the rest were routine summaries. Of the actionable alerts, only 4.8% required immediate action, illustrating that clinic staff spend most of their time managing data with no clinical impact.

Taming the Data Deluge to Prioritize Critical Episodes

To maximize patient outcomes and reduce unnecessary workload, clinic staff need a system that effectively discerns urgent alerts from routine monitoring updates. For the cardiac device clinic at Wellstar Health System in the Atlanta metropolitan area, Vector’s Patient Care Platform has been the ideal alert monitoring solution. Since partnering with Vector Remote Care in 2018, Wellstar has succeeded in triaging urgent alerts more quickly, reducing time to treatment, and decreasing hospitalizations.

The Vector Patient Care Platform’s SmartReports feature tailors alerts according to the specific protocols of each clinic and factors in patient considerations like comorbidities, medication, and historical health trends. The SmartReports system color-codes alerts red, yellow, or green to indicate their clinical urgency and systematically prioritizes the most critical alerts first. This approach allows clinicians to direct their attention where it is most urgently needed and deliver life-saving interventions to the sickest patients.

Using SmartReports to Identify Life-Threatening Episodes

In this 42-second video, Wellstar Cardiac Device Specialist Heather Shipes, LPN, recounts how the Vector remote cardiac monitoring alert system identified and triaged a patient experiencing ventricular tachycardia (VT) who had been shocked by their defibrillator. Thanks to SmartReports’ prioritization of the alert, Heather and her team contacted the patient and scheduled an immediate appointment within 15 minutes.

If your team is seeking an efficient approach to monitoring and triaging urgent cardiac alerts, we invite you to connect with us. We look forward to showing you how the Vector Patient Care SmartReports alert system can help you save time and deliver the best possible care.