ABSTRACT
A common reason for admission to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is for the patient to be in a more closely monitored setting. Despite a growth in monitoring technologies over the last 50 years, there is little evidence that these technologies improve major outcomes. Two monitors that almost every ICU patient receives are telemetry and pulse oximetry. There is some evidence to suggest that telemetry can decrease mortality for in-hospital cardiac arrest, especially asystole or ventricular fibrillation arrests. A recent retrospective observational study comparing monitoring of patients with telemetry versus no telemetry demonstrated higher survival for patients with in-hospital cardiac arrests when telemetry was used. The use of the Pulmonary Artery Catheter (PAC) had been steady during the early 1990s, but began declining after a landmark observational trial in 1996 suggesting increased risk of death in ICU patients receiving PAC. This observational trial cast enough doubt on the benefits of the PAC to finally allow equipoise for randomized trials.
