Clinical Surveillance and Monitoring
What’s the Difference?

In an article titled “Improving Patient Safety through the Use of Nursing Surveillance”, written by Karen K. Giuliano, RN, PhD, FAAN, published by AAMI Horizons, the differences between monitoring and clinical surveillance are evaluated. The article states, “Surveillance and monitoring each represent a distinct process in patient care. Monitoring involves observation, measurement, and recording of physiological parameters while surveillance is a systematic, goal-directed process based on early detection of signs of change, interpretation of clinical implications of such changes, and initiation of rapid, appropriate interventions.”¹
Using a clinical example based on Early Warning System scoring and deployment of rapid response teams, the article proves the importance of surveillance in process improvement and patient care. It states that the ‘use of surveillance versus monitoring resulted in a mean reduction in rapid response deployment time of 291 minutes.” Related, using surveillance to deploy the rapid response team resulted in a shorter median hospital length of stay by 4 days.

Patient Health Monitoring and Clinical Surveillance with Bernoulli One

A total hospital solution, our surveillance solutions allow caregivers to surveil multiple patients and patient data from many sources from a centralized location or via mobile alarm notifications. This enables clinicians to observe patients from any location and respond quickly to patient events. Beyond basic monitoring where the system passes alarm information, Bernoulli uses multi-variate rules to correlate data (i.e., baseline alarm data, real-time streaming data, retrospective data from the EHR, etc.) to create new early warning alarms. Advanced clinical surveillance provides the ultimate patient protection as it helps to identify developing patient events and enables care teams to respond quickly.

Source:

1.  Giuliano, Karen K. “Improving Patient Safety through the Use of Nursing Surveillance.” AAMI Horizons. Spring 2017, pp 34-43. PDF.