Time-dependent analysis of dosage delivery information for patient-controlled analgesia services

PLoS One. 2018 Mar 15;13(3):e0194140. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0194140. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Pain relief always plays the essential part of perioperative care and an important role of medical quality improvement. Patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) is a method that allows a patient to self-administer small boluses of analgesic to relieve the subjective pain. PCA logs from the infusion pump consisted of a lot of text messages which record all events during the therapies. The dosage information can be extracted from PCA logs to provide easily understanding features. The analysis of dosage information with time has great help to figure out the variance of a patient's pain relief condition. To explore the trend of pain relief requirement, we developed a PCA dosage information generator (PCA DIG) to extract meaningful messages from PCA logs during the first 48 hours of therapies. PCA dosage information including consumption, delivery, infusion rate, and the ratio between demand and delivery is presented with corresponding values in 4 successive time frames. Time-dependent statistical analysis demonstrated the trends of analgesia requirements decreased gradually along with time. These findings are compatible with clinical observations and further provide valuable information about the strategy to customize postoperative pain management.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Analgesia, Patient-Controlled / methods*
  • Analgesics / administration & dosage
  • Analgesics / therapeutic use*
  • Drug Dosage Calculations
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Infusion Pumps
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Pain Management / methods*
  • Pain, Postoperative / drug therapy*

Substances

  • Analgesics

Grants and funding

This work was supported by National Science Council, Taiwan (https://www.most.gov.tw/), Grant numbers: NSC 99-2221-E-010-010 and NSC 100-2221-E-010-001; Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taiwan (https://www.vghtpe.gov.tw/), Grant number: V102C-188. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.