Inter-hospital cardiorespiratory telemonitoring of newborns and infants.
Abstract
Cardiorespiratory monitoring is recommended for the assessment of
symptomatic preterm newborns and infants with a clinical history of
Apparent Life-Threatening Events (ALTE). Patients who experience
cardiorespiratory events usually have to be moved to specialized centers
to perform cardiorespiratory studies. To avoid the transfer of these
patients to specialized centers, it has been created a network based on
an interchange system where the recordings were uploaded in
unspecialized centers (spokes) and downloaded by the Sleep Disorders
Breathing (SDB) Center (hub) to be analyzed. From November 2008 to
December 2020 cardiorespiratory recordings belonging to 422 patients
were collected. This study shows that the inter-hospital network is an
efficient system that allows accurate and safe management of infants at
risk of apnoea, bradycardia, and hypoxemia also in unspecialized
centers, avoiding unnecessary transfers of patients and over –
hospitalizations.