Preliminary Evaluation of an Alert to Manage Patients at Risk for Oversedation

In 2021, IMC leadership decided that a clinical decision support (CDS) alert should be created and implemented in acute care units in the hospital to help registered nurses (RNs) identify patients at high risk of respiratory complications from sedation. The CDS alert prompts RNs to implement the High-Risk Monitoring Protocol for patients who meet the high-risk criteria. The alert will inform the RN that the patient is at high risk for oversedation and prompt the RN to document the initiation of the protocol so that patients receiving sedation will be more carefully monitored or to document monitoring was not initiated and why. The new alert to initiate monitoring was implemented in early 2022, and an evaluation plan must be defined to assess the impact. To prepare for evaluation, the objectives for this phase of the project are to: a) describe the workflow associated with the alert as implemented in the health setting, b) perform a preliminary evaluation of the implemented alert, c) define the quality metrics to be tracked over time and recommend an evaluation strategy.