The primary thing the current clinical monitoring system does is to identify when the data are outside some specification limit. The ability to identify a change at first seems simple and not too significant. If a change is good, action may be taken to reinforce results. Also if a treatment has been changed and no statistically significant change occurs in a significant data stream, then the treatment may have had no effect. Often small changes lead to big changes.
Small changes can be early warnings of bigger changes to come in the future.
In particular when specification limits are wide, small changes in vital sign behavior as identified by a control chart allow the caregiver to view vital signs as they are changing, before the major event happens. Statistics are numbers, which represent some aspect of the entity or process being monitored. Vital sign measurements are numbers that measure the behavior of a patient's bodily functions. Vital signs are statistics. Using the manual recording method of the current system it is impossible to collect and record all vital sign measurements for a given patient.