Early warning of code blue at hospitals

Abstract

Code Blue is one of the emergency codes commonly used in hospitals to alert resuscitation teams including all medical, nursing, paramedical, and allied health sciences personnel whenever a patient experiences a cardiac or respiratory arrest. Any hospital personnel can initiate a code blue when they encounter a patient in apparent cardiopulmonary arrest. The Rapid Response Team acts upon the guidelines specified by the hospital and attempts to resuscitate the patient. Research indicates that a patient might display signs of going into cardiac arrest some time before the actual event, and it is possible to predict code blue situations and enable timely intervention, which might help the hospital save lives. Apart from saving lives of many patients, early prediction of Code Blue situations also provides time for hospitals to and allocate resources accordingly for handling emergency situations. Through our study, we seek to develop an early warning system that predicts Code Blue events, based on medical and hospitalization data, vital signs of the patient along with other medical information. For this, we partnered with Apollo Hospitals and collected demographic data, history of hospitalization, vital records gad laboratory measurements of patients, who have either experienced Code Blue or were at high-risk. The main objective of the study was to determine the main factors that can act as predictors of code blue events and trigger the warning system to alert hospital staff about an impending Code Blue event.