Excessive anesthetic effect can prolong recovery and cause cardiovascular depression, cardiac arrest, and postoperative mortality. Inadequate anesthetic effect can cause unintentional intraoperative awareness. With the goal of avoiding these consequences, brain monitoring helps guide the clinician in managing anesthetic medications. However, terms and concepts related to brain monitoring are not used consistently, many anesthesia providers were trained before such advances were used, and although several technologies are available, they all do not have the same evidence base and may differ in impact on various clinical situations. Thus, clinicians require education to maximize their use of brain monitoring to improve patient outcomes.
