Alarm Fatigue Plagues Hospitals. Again. Still.

On April 8, 2013, the Joint Commission published a Sentinel Event Alert on medical device alarm safety in hospitals. Once again, alarm hazards tops the ECRI Institute’s 2013 Top 10 Health Technology Hazards. Alarm fatigue is unfortunately a topic that is evergreen because it has plagued hospitals for many years and shows little sign of abating. A search of the literature will show the most common consequence of alarm fatigue is a failure to rescue adverse event (in which the vast majority of patients die). A secondary consequence is on patient satisfaction; constant alarms audible throughout the unit make it difficult for patients to sleep. The root causes of alarm fatigue can be divided into two areas:  1) nuisance alarms caused by false positive alarms, leads-off alarms (most often due to motion artifact, poor lead prep and/or low quality sensors), and alarms that are not clinically actionable (i.e., the alarm goes off and the nurse responds, but there’s nothing for them to do), and 2) noise pollution resulting from annunciating all the alarms in a busy high acuity unit at sufficient sound levels to be heard throughout the unit. Effectively managing alarm fatigue requires hospitals to do a number of somewhat complicated of things well. The Joint Commission Sentinel Event Alert, and AAMI’s efforts on alarms tend to focus on these basics: Properly setting alarm limits, Buying quality physiological sensors, proper prep and placement of physiological sens...
Source: Medical Connectivity Consulting - Category: Technology Consultants Authors: Tags: Patient Safety Source Type: blogs