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

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

I-Ting Kuo  1 , Kuang-Yi Chang  2 , De-Fong Juan  1 , Steen J Hsu  3 , Chia-Tai Chan  1 , Mei-Yung Tsou  2   4
Affiliations

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

I-Ting Kuo et al. PLoS One. .

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.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. The flowchart of PCA DIG.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Percentages of the continuous infusion rate changing trend from previous time frame to current frame in IVPCA cases.
P, Z, and N represented increased infusion, no change, and decreased infusion respectively (see Methods).
Fig 3
Fig 3. Percentages of the continuous infusion rate changing trend from initial time to current frame in IVPCA cases.
P, Z, and N represented increased infusion, no change, and decreased infusion respectively (see Methods).
Fig 4
Fig 4. Percentages of the continuous infusion rate changing trend from previous time frame to current frame in PCEA cases.
P, Z, and N represented increased infusion, no change, and decreased infusion respectively (see Methods).
Fig 5
Fig 5. Percentages of the continuous infusion rate changing trend from initial time to current frame in PCEA cases.
P, Z, and N represented increased infusion, no change, and decreased infusion respectively (see Methods).
Fig 6
Fig 6. Estimated marginal means of value.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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