De-escalating Vital Sign Checks

Patients in the hospital often report poor sleep. A lack of sleep not only affects a patient's recovery from illness and their overall feeling of wellness, but it is a leading factor in the development of delirium in the hospital. One method for improving sleep in the hospital is to reduce the number of patient care related interruptions that a patient experiences. Vital sign checks at night are one example. In hospitalized patients who are clinically stable, vital sign checks that interrupt sleep are often unnecessary. However, identifying which patients can forego these checks is not a simple task. Currently, the hospital's quality improvement team asks physicians to think about this issue every day and order reduced, or "sleep promotion", vital sign checks on patients they believe could safely tolerate it. The investigators goal is to use a predictive analytics tool to reduce the cognitive burden of this task for busy physicians.

The investigators plan to develop a logistic regression model, trained on data from the electronic health record (EHR), to predict, for a given patient on a given night, whether they could safely tolerate the reduction of overnight vital sign checks. The model will use variables, such as the patient's age, the number of days they have been in the hospital, the vital signs from that day, the lab values from that day, and other clinical variables to make its prediction. The outcome is a binary variable, whether the patient will or will not have abnormal vital signs that night. The training data is retrospective therefore it contains the nighttime vitals that were observed, which the investigators will code as a binary variable and use as the outcome variable for the model to train against.

The investigators will incorporate this algorithm into an EHR alert so physicians can observe its output during their work, and use this information, complemented by their own clinical judgment, to decide about ordering reduced vital sign checks for a given patient.

The investigators will study the effect of this EHR alert on several outcomes: in-hospital delirium (measured by nurse assessment), sleep opportunity (a measurement, based on observational EHR data, of patient care related sleep interruptions), and patient satisfaction (measured by nationally-administered post-hospitalization HCAHPS surveys). Balancing measures, to ensure that reduced vital sign checks do not cause patient harm, will be rapid response calls and code blue calls.

Physician teams will be randomized to either see the EHR alert (intervention arm) or not see the EHR alert.