I'll be attending the international conference focused on pre-attack intervention of at-risk patients in an effort to reduce adverse events and eventual failure to rescue. Here's how the conference describes it:

Rapid Response Systems (RRS) / Medical Emergency Teams (METs) are a preplanned
group of health care practitioners who respond to acute patient deteriorations in hospitalized patients. They are usually identical to hospital "code" teams, with the exception that they respond prior to patients' developing cardiac arrest. This recovery
response has been shown to decrease unexpected hospital mortality by some 30% in hospitals in the United States, Australia, and Great Britain. Even though the system has been reported since 1995, few hospitals have knowledge of or experience with METs.

The conference course director is Michael DeVita MD, with UPMC, and will be held in down town Pittsburgh. I'll be blogging from the event, and gathering info for my story on monitoring unmonitored patients (along with a sidebar on this conference).

Improving patient safety and outcomes is not easy and there's not an abundance of medical devices to support increased nursing vigilance, especially in noisy and chaotic care environments. There's growing vendor interest in new products that could support caregivers and rapid response teams in hospitals, and there seems to be growing interest in buying such new products.

Thanks to reader Steffen Schmitt for sending me the link to this conference. Pictured right is a rapid response team drill held at Legacy Salmon Creek Hospital in the Portland, Oregon metro area.