Effect of an Automated Paging System on Response to Critical Laboratory Values

NCT00469924 | Completed

• 1 other identifier: Etchells1
• Study Type: interventional
• Target: 271
• Locations: 1 country
• Sites: 1

Brief Summary

Patients in hospitals may develop serious problems that are detected by blood tests. It is very important for the physicians to be notified of these abnormal blood tests as soon as possible. Currently, this is done using phone calls from the lab to the nurse. The nurse then pages the doctor and waits for a call back. We are conducting a study using an automated paging system that immediately alerts the physician directly. We will test whether the automated system affects the time for the physician to respond to the abnormality. If the physician's patient has a serious laboratory result, we will automatically send this laboratory result to the physician's PDA. We will also provide guidelines for treating the patient. These guidelines will come from existing hospital policies where available, or from local expert opinion. We will determine whether patients get better and faster care because of the automated alerting system.

Conditions

Critical Laboratory Values; Drug Laboratory Interactions; Drug Drug Interactions

Keywords

Informatics; Clinical Laboratory Information Systems; Hospital Communication Systems; Laboratory Techniques and Procedures; Point-of-Care Systems; Therapy, Computer-Assisted

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (1)

• (1) time to response, defined as the time to a physician order and (2) quality of response, defined as whether the response was concordant with existing evidence based protocols of care.

  During acute care hospitalization

Secondary Outcomes (1)

• Secondary outcome measures will be: length of stay, mortality, time to resolution and frequency of recurrence.

  During acute care hospitalization

Study Arms (2)

Alerting system ON

EXPERIMENTAL

Alerting system is ON

Procedure: Real Time Clinical Alerting

Alerting system OFF

NO INTERVENTION

Alerting system is OFF

Interventions

Real Time Clinical Alerting PROCEDURE

Alerting system ON

Eligibility Criteria

• Sex: all
• Healthy Volunteers: No
• Age Groups: Child (0-17), Adult (18-64), Older Adult (65+)

You may qualify if:

• Patients with critical laboratory values or hazardous drug-lab or drug-drug conditions, admitted to inpatient general medicine units

You may not qualify if:

• Values or conditions where no clinical action can be taken

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre: lead
• University Health Network, Toronto: collaborator

Study Sites (1)

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Toronto, Ontario, M4N 3M5, Canada

Location

Study Officials

• Edward E Etchells, MD MSc

  Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Study Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Phase: not applicable
• Allocation: RANDOMIZED
• Masking: SINGLE
• Who Masked: OUTCOMES ASSESSOR
• Intervention Model: PARALLEL
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
• PI Title: Associate Professor, Staff Physician

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: May 3, 2007
• First Posted: May 7, 2007
• Study Start: February 1, 2006
• Primary Completion: June 1, 2008
• Study Completion: September 1, 2008
• Last Updated: May 17, 2016

Record last verified: 2016-05

Locations

CA (1)