Background: Cardiac telemetry was originally designed to help detect and provide early intervention in arrhythmic complications of myocardial infarction. Today, however, telemetry use continues to expand beyond the critical and coronary care units, despite adequate research displaying questionable benefit. Our study seeks to assess the utility of telemetry in identifying decompensation in patients with documented [...]

Background: Cardiac monitoring (CM) is often overused, hindering patient mobility, triggering unnecessary cardiac testing, delaying appropriate discharge, and expending resources.  Purpose: To reduce the days that medical and surgical ward patients spend on CM without an indication specified in the 2004 American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines for CM.  Description: At Cedars-Sinai, only 59% of patients [...]

Background: Telemetry is overused in hospitals and continues to be a source of health system waste. Although there have been studies on the cause as well as efforts to reduce telemetry overuse, the extent to which physicians are aware that their patients are on telemetry has not been studied. Unawareness of telemetry status has both [...]

Background: In 2004, the American Heart Association (AHA) published recommendations on the use of cardiac monitoring in the hospital setting. It provided a rating system for its indications (Class I-III), which stratify the likelihood of benefit. In June 2013, The Joint Commission approved NPSG.06.01.01, a patient safety goal on clinical alarm use in the hospital [...]