Nurse-Led Vital Signs Monitoring Can Safely Identify Low-Risk Hematology-Oncology Patients For De-Escalation.

Purpose: It is routine practice for patients to be on vital signs monitoring (VSM) once every 4 hours, which is laborious and disruptive. VSM de-escalation has been demonstrated to be safe in low-risk (LR) patients, but it has not been well studied in the hematology-oncology setting.

Methods: A quality improvement project was conducted in 3 hematology-oncology inpatient wards within a comprehensive cancer center, from March 2017 to July 2017 (pilot phase) and from October 2017 to Sept 2018 (maintenance phase).