Influences on the performance of hospital clinical event monitoring

The implementation of real-time clinical monitors in large hospital information systems places large performance demands on these systems. Meeting these demands not only requires methodologies to augment the performance of individual monitors but an understanding of how patient population and monitor characteristics might influence overall system performance. We have built a multimonitor simulator to study these influences on performance. In doing so, we have focused on the impact of a variety of techniques to cache a subset of a large number of monitors in primary memory.