Patient safety solutions company Bernoulli has announced a new application for the continuous monitoring of patients at risk of respiratory depression.

Bernoulli’s Respiratory Depression Safety Surveillance (RDSS) solution utilizes comprehensive real-time data to help clinicians quickly recognize and respond to signs of respiratory distress. RDSS includes exclusive analytics with multi-variable thresholds—adjustable by the care facility—to identify clinically actionable events while significantly reducing the overall number of alarms communicated to remote and mobile clinicians, mitigating the risk of alarm fatigue.

One of the most common monitoring methods today—periodic physical spot checks by direct-care clinical staff—can leave patients unmonitored up to 96% of the time. Additionally, the adoption of continuous respiratory surveillance is beset by significant challenges, including reduced visual and audible oversight due to single-patient rooms and high nurse-to-patient ratios in many care areas with at-risk patients, and limitations of stand-alone respiratory monitoring devices that can have high rates of false and non-clinically actionable alarms. The disruption of direct-care clinical staff workflow also is a major barrier to continuous monitoring.

Bernoulli’s RDSS solution provides connectivity to a hospital’s existing fleet of pulse oximeters and capnographs from a wide range of vendors, including Medtronic, Masimo, and others. RDSS also integrates with mobile clinical communication tools to deliver the right alarms and alerts to the right caregiver at the right time.

In a forthcoming clinical study of patients diagnosed or at risk of obstructive or central sleep apnea, to be published in the Journal of Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology (“A pilot study in middleware-filtered capnography alarms of continuously monitored obstructive sleep apnea patient in a medical-surgical unit”), the use of Bernoulli’s RDSS analytics reduced 22,812 alarms generated by bedside capnographs and pulse oximeters to just 209 respiratory depression alerts delivered to mobile clinicians—a reduction of 99%. The RDSS analytics distributed alerts for every patient that experienced an actual respiratory depression episode.

“The risks inherent in delivering opioids or patient-controlled analgesia to post-operative patients increase the possibility for sentinel events, particularly in patient populations managing chronic illnesses or co-morbidities, such as sleep apnea and obesity,” says Janet Dillione, CEO of Bernoulli, in a release. “Bernoulli’s RDSS solution effectively delivers on the recommendations of The Joint Commission, AAMI Foundation, and ECRI Institute that hospitals implement continuous respiratory monitoring for these at-risk patients.”