Can Early Warning Systems Enhance Detection of High Risk Patients by Rapid Response Teams?

Purpose: We sought to evaluate if incorporating an early warning system (EWS), the Visensia Safety Index (VSI) and the National Early Warning Systems 2 (NEWS2), may lead to earlier identification of rapid response team (RRT) patients.

Methods: This was a retrospective study (2015-2018) of patients experiencing RRT activation within a tertiary care network. We evaluated the proportion of patients with an EWS alert prior to RRT activation and their associated outcomes (primary: hospital mortality).

A fundamental relationship between intraventricular conduction and heart rate.

Background: Existence of a relationship between the electrocardiographic QRS interval duration and the diurnally varying heart rate, of consistent sign and magnitude, is controversial and the relationship has not been fully characterized in normal populations.

Methods And Results: We analyzed the QRS-RR interval relationship in 884 Holter recordings in 410 normal subjects participating in 5 clinical trials. The slope of the linear regression of QRS on RR was positive in 93% of subjects with an average slope of 0.

Automated QT analysis that learns from cardiologist annotations.

Background: Reliable, automated QT analysis would allow the use of all the ECG data recorded during continuous Holter monitoring, rather than just intermittent 10-second ECGs.

Methods: BioQT is an automated ECG analysis system based on a Hidden Markov Model, which is trained to segment ECG signals using a database of thousands of annotated waveforms. Each sample of the ECG signal is encoded by its wavelet transform coefficients.