[Quality control of computer-assisted arrhythmia monitoring]

In the management of coronary care patients, continuous ECG analysis is best performed by a computerized monitoring system. For more than 2 years all the patients in this CCU have been monitored by the 78220 Hewlett-Packard arrhythmia monitoring system. As a quality control of the system the data of 15,068 alarm situations in 300 patients were first analyzed: the specificity of the system varied from 3% to 83% according to type and severity of arrhythmias. To evaluate the sensitivity of the system the amount of VES registered by Holter monitoring was then compared with the analysis by computerized monitoring during the same period of time: in a total of over 10,000 VES in 14 patients the sensitivity was 90%. Although the personnel of a CCU still have to deal with a large number of false positive alarms, a computerized arrhythmia monitoring system offers a higher degree of security for the patient than conventional monitoring.