Inpatient continuous cardiac monitoring in hyper-acute stroke: a comparison between telemetry by cardiology and stroke unit

Abstract

This retrospective study assessed the pattern of telemetry usage and rates of atrial fibrillation (AF) detection in the 6 months pre- and post-implementation of stroke unit monitored telemetry; 122/154 (79%) of patients had telemetry prior to implementation of stroke unit based telemetry and 164/194 (85%) in the 5 months post (P = 0.31). The use of stroke unit based telemetry was associated with a small increase of telemetry usage and significant increase in telemetry hours per patient. AF detection was similar during the two study periods.