Nutritional Alert in hospitalized patients

摘要

The objective of the study is to assess a nutritional risk alert using an Informatics System in hospitalized patients versus the conventional methodology. Method: we studied 400 medical patients at the Belgrano Hospital Critical Care Unit. We considered two groups of 200 patients. In the first the group (Control Group), nutritional risk was diagnosed in a traditional way. In the second group (Alarm Group), nutritional risk was diagnosed with an alert system. The alert was triggered when a patient showed low levels of, at least, two of the following variables: albumin, cholesterol, triglyceride, lymphocyte or low body mass index (BMI). Results: nutritional risk was detected in 20.3% of the Control Group patients while, in the Alert Group, nutritional risk was detected in 34.3% of the patients; the difference between the two groups was significant (p<0.001), with a sensitivity rate of 99% and a specificity rate of 98%.Conclusion: malnutrition is more easily detected when using an alert system.