Impact on ventilator-check time of an in-circuit computerized respiratory monitoring system

To ensure appropriate quality control of mechanical ventilatory support in our institution, checks of patient status and ventilator performance are made every 2 hours. Our standard method of surveillance requires disconnecting the patient from the ventilator and connecting him to extraneous monitoring devices. We assessed the use of an in-circuit computerized respiratory monitoring system for ventilator surveillance and found that with this system significantly less therapist time was required to perform a check (5.8 +/- 1.18 minutes vs 9.9 +/- 1.53 minutes for the standard procedure) and that use of this system avoids the potential hazards associated with disconnecting a patient from the ventilator and introducing additional monitoring devices to the airway.