Issues in selecting and using apnea documentation systems.

The primary purpose of apnea monitoring is to ensure adequate warning of certain life-threatening respiratory and cardiac events, often in infants monitored at home. However, parents often become frustrated by frequent alarms, and other may not use the monitor at all. Unfortunately, ECRI has received a number of incident reports in which infants have died while not connected to their monitors or where a failure to monitor was suspected. We believe that some of these deaths may have been prevented if monitoring had been used properly. The most important step that parents can take to achieve effective monitoring is to faithfully follow the directions of their doctor. In an effort to ensure parental compliance, documentation capability has been added to many of today's monitors. In addition, those involved in providing patient care, especially the prescribing physicians, durable medical equipment (DME) providers, report scorers, interpreting physicians, and other clinicians, should carefully review their monitoring programs and the available documentation monitoring systems to determine how they can best meet their patients' needs. Below, we discuss the factors to consider when contemplating documented apnea monitoring and when selecting a documented monitoring system. The documentation features discussed are those we considered to be distinguishing factors among the systems evaluated in this issue and affected how we rated and ranked these units.