Early Warning Scores

Collaborators 

• Prof. Lionel Tarassenko (project lead)
• Dr. Peter Watkinson (Nuffield Department of Medicine)

Description 

The System for Electronic Notes Documentation (SEND) project was developed with support from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, led by Prof. Lionel Tarassenko, and won funding from the "Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards" NHS Technology Fund. SEND uses the computer tablets to record and evaluate patients' vital signs, replacing traditional paper charts. It will help alert medical staff to early patient deterioration quickly and reliably, and allow that data to be shared with specialists across the hospital sites.

Medical staff will take regular readings of a patient's vital signs such as heart rate and blood pressure according to current practice, but instead of writing the information on an observation chart, they will input it into a computer tablet. Using specially developed software, an Early Warning Score will be calculated and displayed instantly. Clinical staff will use this score to help them decide whether further medical intervention is needed. While a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Lionel Tarassenko, David Clifton co-developed the early-warning score used within the SEND system.

See also: [OxBRC], [News]