Efficacy of supplemental alarm for critically low intraoperative blood pressure

Editor's Note

In this study, a supplemental alert for severe intraoperative hypotension did not reduce the duration of hypotension or hospitalization.

Because intraoperative hypotension is associated with complications that might be ameliorated by earlier intervention, researchers randomized 1,598 patients to hypotension alerts and 1,567 to no alerts.

The median time to return to a normal blood pressure was 1 minute in each group. Median hospital length of stay was similar for both groups at 2 days.

BACKGROUND: Intraoperative hypotension is associated with complications that might be ameliorated by earlier intervention. We therefore tested the primary hypothesis that a supplemental decision support alert for critically low systolic blood pressure (SBP) decreases the duration of intraoperativ...