Schizophrenia is a common disease, characterized by progressive functional decline exacerbated by psychotic relapses that often result from a lack of full adherence to antipsychotic (APS) medication. Although atypical APS medications do not have clear therapeutic windows, as generally required for therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM), measuring APS plasma levels in the context of a population expe...

Many patients are believed to be at risk of dysrhythmias and are felt to require cardiac monitoring. These patients may not be deemed ill enough to occupy a high dependency or critical care bed and are monitored on general wards. Monitoring policies vary widely not only between institutions, but also between individual medical staff. These variations occur due to differing availability of resou...

This paper will present a focused and personal history of physiologic monitoring, beginning with the discovery of modern anesthesia and its development from a technical practice to a scientific discipline. Emphasis will be on the essence of monitoring in the anesthesia evolution, and this work will attempt to answer the question of how to evaluate the impact of monitoring on patient outcome. Un...

Based on a previously derived population pharmacokinetic model, a novel neonatal amikacin dosing regimen was developed. The aim of the current study was to prospectively evaluate this dosing regimen. First, early (before and after second dose) therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) observations were evaluated for achieving target trough (<3 mg/liter) and peak (>24 mg/liter) levels. Second, all obser...

In many industrial and non-industrial applications the quality of a process or product is characterized by a relationship between a response variable and one or more explanatory variables. This relationship is referred to as profile. In the past decade, profile monitoring has been extensively studied under the normal response variable, but it has paid a little attention to the profile with the ...

OBJECTIVES To examine the association of risk factors, age, gender, and earlier opioid requirement with the rate of dose escalation in long-term opioid therapy. METHODS This is a retrospective cohort study of 1,922 individuals identified from California's prescription drug monitoring program database who continuously used opioids from 1999 to 2007. A linear mixed-effects model was used to exa...

We review some of the recent developments of optical performance monitoring (OPM) in various aspects: (i) the enhancement of monitoring resolution, (ii) multi-impairment monitoring, and (iii) OPM network optimization. In particular, some of the studies on the optimization of performance monitoring networks to achieve the optimal monitoring locations and the number of monitoring probes are discu...

BACKGROUND Gentamicin and vancomycin are commonly used in neonatal units for the treatment of life-threatening infections. This study aimed to describe the dosage regimen and the approach to therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) for both antibiotics in units that participate in a UK neonatal network. METHODS Questionnaires were sent to all units across the Extended Neonatal Network, requesting de...

Target concentration intervention (TCI) is proposed as an alternative conceptual strategy to therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM). It is argued that the idea of a therapeutic range has limited the interpretation of measured drug concentrations and diminished the anticipated clinical benefit to patients by use of an oversimplified pharmacodynamic model. TCI on the other hand embraces pharmacokineti...

May/June 2012 become an issue in medical-legal cases. There are no national standards for setting parameters for EFM alerts or the timeframe expected for acknowledgement. Often default settings are determined when the system is installed and may vary widely from one institution to another. In many cases, the default settings can be altered by the clinician based on the individual patient situat...