Resumen de Developing a Vital Sign Alert System

Barbara G. Jones

• This article describes the implementation of a nurse-designed, automated system for enhancing patient monitoring on medical-surgical and step-down nursing units. The system, which is not derived from any of the early warning scoring systems described in nursing literature, was developed and put into place at a large tertiary hospital in eastern Virginia and found to substantially reduce out-of-unit codes without increasing nurses' workload.