Benchmarking blood sugar control in the small rural intensive care unit

ABSTRACT Objective: We sought to determine a benchmark for our blood glucose monitoring and compare our data to published data. Methods: Natividad Medical Center is a 172-bed rural hospital located in Salinas, California. Point of care blood glucose (POC-BG) data was extracted from our EMR for all ICU patients greater than 18 years of age between January 2014 and May 2018. Patient day-weighted mean POC-BGs were calculated for each patient by calculating the average POC-BG per day for each patient. Proportion measurements for each of our measurements groups were recorded (>180 mg/dL, <70 mg/dL, >250 mg/dL and <50 mg/dL). Monthly averages were plotted for visual comparison. Benchmarks were calculated by using 2x Standard Deviation for each measurement group. Results: A total of 3164 patients were found with 21,006 POC-BG measurements. The average POC-BG was 136 mg/dL and median 119 mg/dL. Proportion measurements of monthly day-weighted mean POC-BGs ranged from 0–1.2%, 5.3–44.8%, 0–0.3% and 0.6–16.5%, respectively for less than 70 mg/dL, greater than 180 mg/dL, less than 50 mg/dL and greater than 250 mg/dL. A 2x Standard Deviation was used to calculate our benchmark cut offs which provides a 95% confidence interval and includes 97.5% when neglecting the lower range. Our calculated benchmark values are 1.2, 38.2, 0.19, and 13.1% respectively for measurement groups less than 70 mg/dL, greater than 180 mg/dL, less than 50 mg/dL and greater than 250 mg/dL. Conclusion: Here we present data from a small rural hospital in the Western United States. We calculated benchmarks that could be used to track our ongoing hyper/hypoglycemia improvement projects. We found that when compared to published data, our hyper/hypoglycemia data was comparable to national data.