Vigilance in Cardiac Telemetry Monitoring: Performance Outcomes and Effects on Operators’ Cognitive and Affective States

Abstract

Healthcare represents an industry where any errors have the potential to lead to significant consequences such as unintended patient injury or death. Teams of healthcare professionals work together to complete patient care activities across several hospital environments including operating rooms, trauma centers, and care floors. While most healthcare tasks are patient-facing, some tasks such as cardiac telemetry monitoring occur without much patient interaction. Even so, cardiac telemetry monitoring represents a task where errors result in patient harm or death. The purpose of this study was to investigate the vigilance decrement using a healthcare visual search task based on cardiac telemetry monitoring. Results of this study were viewed through the lens of resource theory of vigilance. Findings from this study include a decrease in correct detections and false alarms with increased workload which supports previous vigilance decrement research as well providing directions for future research.