Friday, April 14, 2006

Trending

Four calls in the city today: a fall/weakness/dementia all in one, a homeless man alcoholic had a seizure, an unresponsive diabetic, and a minor motor vehicle.

We put the endtidal capnography on the weakness patient. I did it just to show my preceptee how it worked and to try out this feature the teacher told me about yesterday. It's called trending. He asked me if we had it on our Lifepack. I had never heard of it, so I said we didn't. The bottom line is so you go into the print menu and where it says code summary, you punch report and the trending option comes up. Hit that and then hit print. You get a minute by minute graph of whatever vitals signs you had programmed. In our case we got HR, RR, SP02, and Co2. I guess if you get into the programming, you can actually have the trending show up on the screen. The instuctor made the analogy of a stock markey screen -- not only does it tell you what the price is now, you can see where it has been over the last week (or in the patient's case the last thirty minutes).