Queen's Cardiac Units Use Advanced Technology to Respond to Heart Patients STAT

Carolyn Tanabe, RN, and Tina Harvell, RN, demonstrate Queen's StatView system.

Pager technology is not just for telling someone you want them to call, or for sending a simple message. Nurses can now get an instant readout of a patient's heart rhythm-right on a pager-sized LCD window.

At Queen's, the Medical and Surgical Telemetry units recently switched to the StatView system, which uses pager-like devices worn by every registered nurse on the units. If any patient's heart rhythm goes beyond certain parameters, the system alarms the patient's nurse.

The nurse then checks his or her StatView-which looks just like a pager-and can actually see a graph of six seconds of heart rhythm. The nurse can see immediately if the heart incident is something significant. If a patient has a lethal arrhythmia, StatView alerts all nurses in the unit. Queen's is the first hospital in Hawai'i to install the technology.

StatView replaces the cardiac monitoring room, where Monitor Techs continuously watched patients' heart rhythms. The benefits of the new system are that patients can get instant response (instead of overhead paging of nurses), and that patient care is now in the hands of the bedside caregivers-nurses.